Opening Pdf With Other App From Assets Folder, Workarounds

In my app, I've got some pdf's stored in my assets folder. I've seen libraries for opening pdf-pages, but I think that apps such as quickoffice are better at showing the pdf's than

Solution 1:

Therefore I need to copy the files to the external storage and provide that file to the intent.

You can also try my StreamProvider, a canned ContentProvider, based on Google's FileProvider, that streams from assets.

For multiple assets, this should work for the StreamProvider XML metadata:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><pathsxmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"><assetname="whatevs"/></paths>

That should resolve all content://your.authority.name.goes.here/whatevs/*Uri values (for various values of *) to files inside of assets/. If you want to limit the scope to some specific subdirectory of assets/ (say, assets/goodstuff/), you would use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><pathsxmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"><assetname="whatevs"path="goodstuff/"/></paths>

And, if this does not work, it should, so feel free to file an issue with a reproducible test case.

Is this a good work-around or will this cause problems with the pdf-viewing app?

startActivity() is asynchronous, and so the external PDF viewer will never be able to access the file this way.