android vs android.Manifest.permission

[NickIliev]

From @snekbaev on November 21, 2016 7:7

Hi,

I had a 2.3 NG2+TS project. To work with permissions, say android.Manifest.permission.SEND_SMS I had to declare var android : any;. Upgraded to 2.4, noticed that if I remove that declaration then I get quite rich intellisense in vscode. However, when done so TS complains that Manifest is not defined in the provided global android variable. To make it happy I have to resort back to the aforementioned android:any and basically lose intellisense.

What is the suggested workaround to keep both parties happy?

Copied from original issue: NativeScript/NativeScript#3128

[NickIliev]

From @Pip3r4o on November 21, 2016 8:59

Hey @snekbaev, with 2.4 there's an experimental feature in the android domain that will generate typings (.Manifest included) for your needs. To try it out run any tns build/run android command with the --androidTypings flag. That should also eliminate the need to use tns-platform-declarations, and even replace it.

[snekbaev]

Hi,

Still have the tns-platform-declarations installed. Used the --androidTypings key, then had to modify the references.d.ts (otherwise TS was complaining about duplicates) to have:

/// <reference path="./node_modules/tns-core-modules/tns-core-modules.es2016.d.ts" />
/// <reference path="./node_modules/tns-platform-declarations/ios.d.ts" />
/// <reference path="./android.d.ts" />

then was able to remove a couple of android:any, however the following became a problem:

declare var com: any;
function getStartPendingIntent(context) {
    var intent = new android.content.Intent(context, com.tns.broadcastreceivers.NotificationEventReceiver.class);

made a workaround by commenting out the com: any and changing the intent part to:

var intent = new android.content.Intent(context, java.lang.Class.forName("com.tns.broadcastreceivers.NotificationEventReceiver"));

I suppose com.tns support will come in future?

Thank you!

[petekanev]

@snekbaev, the com.tns.whatever.whatever can be any valid Java full class name identifier (namespace + class name). a.b.c.D.V for example is valid, however at this point we cannot provide support out of the box for a dynamically created class in TypeScript. We believe the user is responsible for providing typings (if the classes are to be used publicly) for the classes they create.

Depending on how you created the NotificationEventReceiverm I you should be able to use .class

declare module com {
  declare module tns {
    declare module broadcastreceivers {
      @JavaProxy(".....")
      export class NotificationEventReceiver extends android.content.BroadcastReceiver {
      }
    }
  }
}

And if all else fails, you've already figured out one way to work past TypeScript's limitations by using reflection.

[snekbaev]

@Pip3r4o I see. I remember when started out with NS I began renaming the com.tns in the manifest to match those to my liking and of course broke the app :) Since decided to ignore those for now. But yes, I renamed the broadcastreceiver string in the manifest and updated the value in the actual class. It does work.
What interesting is that the class has declare var android: any; and if I comment it out (because I did --androidTypings) TS complains about .extend in the following:

android.content.BroadcastReceiver.extend("com.xxxxx.beeper.broadcastreceivers.IncomingSmsBroadcastReceiver", {

So I tried to rework the JS version into TS. I will provide both implementations in https://github.com/NativeScript/sample-android-background-services/issues so that it can be validated and help others

Update: posted to NativeScript/sample-android-background-services#6

[petekanev]

@snekbaev TS complaining about .extend is absolutely normal as it has no notion of that function, and it is valid in JS-only files. Not saying it won't work, but TypeScript will normally refuse to compile the file when there are things it doesn't understand.

Closing this issue as resolved.