Support for local file links that open the appropriate app

[hightowe]

Yesterday, I created home screen links with "Cx File Explorer" to playlist files residing on my device (<playlist>.xspf) and now I can single click home screen icons to open the VLC App and immediately start playing a playlist. That eliminated opening VLC and then browsing and clicking a playlist, which is far better when driving. Even better, I added the open sourced "Lockscreen Widgets" to the mix and can now do that from my lockscreen!

This all works a charm, and the "Cx File Explorer" app is nice, but it would be great to have all of my "links" consolidated (both local files and URLs) into one nice app, and particularly one with the ability to backup and restore those, which "Cx File Explorer" cannot do. For that reason, I am floating this as a potential feature addition. I completely understand if you'd like to keep this app focused on just URLs, but on the other hand if this is an easy feature addition, I think it would be very useful.

[Waboodoo]

In principle, I like the idea. Opening files would go along well with the already existing features of opening apps or URLs.

Unfortunately, files are a tricky topic on Android. In short, by design the HTTP Shortcuts app does not have access to the file system, except to very specific parts where the user explicitly grants permission. These parts are then exposed to the app for reading and writing, but the app won't know where on the file system these files are, which in turn makes it impossible to invoke another app to open them.

The next best thing that would probably be possible would be to use the sendIntent function to invoke "Cx File Explorer" or another app with full file system access to open a specific file, without the HTTP Shortcuts app itself knowning anything about the file. This would just require figuring out the specific parameters that the file explorer app needs to receive in the intent.

[hightowe]

In principle, I like the idea. Opening files would go along well with the already existing features of opening apps or URLs.

Unfortunately, files are a tricky topic on Android. In short, by design the HTTP Shortcuts app does not have access to the file system, except to very specific parts where the user explicitly grants permission. These parts are then exposed to the app for reading and writing, but the app won't know where on the file system these files are, which in turn makes it impossible to invoke another app to open them.

The next best thing that would probably be possible would be to use the sendIntent function to invoke "Cx File Explorer" or another app with full file system access to open a specific file, without the HTTP Shortcuts app itself knowning anything about the file. This would just require figuring out the specific parameters that the file explorer app needs to receive in the intent.

Thanks a ton for your detailed explanation and introducing me to the Android Intent's system. I dug into that and from what I learned solved my problem in an even more elegant way, and maybe I have some useful into to share back to you. In short, I created the intent shown below and it perfectly opens the VLC App and auto-plays my playlist. I am sharing these details with you because they might be helpful to you in thinking through adding this particular feature...

Intent: Activity
package: org.videolan.vlc
component/class: org.videolan.vlc.gui.video.VideoPlayerActivity
data: /storage/emulated/0/Music/00_Playlists/my_streaming_radio.xspf

Importantly, those items are just "strings" (including the data field). The "source" app does not need "all files" permission. Instead, I just used "Cx File Explorer" to copy/paste the full path of the *.xspf file into the data field and, voila.

The open source Activity Manager app is a little basic and the UI is a little clumsy, but it works and it and some Google Gemini chatting is what I used to figure out how to get the VLC Intent that I needed to accomplish what I wanted: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.activitymanager/

After I figured that out, I added that intent to PhoneProfilesPlus (an open source app that I have used it for many years) and I have it triggered automatically when PhoneProfilesPlus sees my phone Bluetooth pair to my car, which was really my goal from the beginning: https://github.com/henrichg/PhoneProfilesPlus

I think that adding Android Intents to your app would be awesome, to have a consolidated place for URLs and Intents, but to be fair it's not really needed since apps like Activity Manager exist, but the "everything in one place" would be very nice.