Why do filestreams need a context?

Question

I've been working on developing a library for my company for the past couple months and have been annoyed by the fact that filestreams seem to need a context whenever I store or load data to the internal storage.

I have designed the library to work like this :

A singleton class is made for providing and handling a keychain(containing app key and device id) and authinfo(user and password)
Whenever a request to call to a web service is made the calling class will attempt to get an instance of the singleton class and get the keychain and auth info through it like such :

SingletonClass.getInstance().getCredentials(Context ctx);

The result of this is that I need to constantly provide the context of the calling activity as most of my library revolves around calling an API with credentials and device id as parameters.

I am specifically referring to these lines :

....
          FileOutputStream fos = ctx.openFileOutput(filename,                      
                   Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
          fos.write(buf);
          fos.close(); 
....

I am confused as to why the specific context of the activity calling is needed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Is there another way of solving this design issue ?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 05 '12 at 10:14

0

The file storage API is provided by the Context class. So you need it.

answered Jun 05 '12 at 10:14

Vipul

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That begs the question: If Activity X calls save with 'this'. Will Activity Y then be able to load this data from the internal storage? – CodePrimate Jun 05 '12 at 10:33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

0

The application context should work for this - you could consider using this method: Using Application context everywhere? so you can easily get the application context without having to pass it around.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

Community

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answered Jun 05 '12 at 10:25

Jords

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Why do filestreams need a context?

2 Answers2