react-native: [Android][0.29] No longer possible to access Activity from SimpleViewManager

Having getPackages take an Activity parameter is a much worse idea than making ReactContext#getCurrentActivity() public, for the following reasons:

1. We don’t want to tie package / module / viewmanager (and ultimately ReactContext / react instance) creation to an Activity, as we want to be able to initialize a react instance in any context.
2. As the current in getCurrentActivity() suggests, the Activity can change over time. Holding a reference to whatever the activity was at react instance creation time is both incorrect and a memory leak.

As long as we properly document getCurrentActivity() (I think it already is documented in caps that you shouldn’t hold references to the result), it should be fine to make it public.

ThemedReactContext#getCurrentActivity() seems to be allways null in react-native version 0.31.0. At least on property setting it is still null. @marcshilling on which react-native version did your workaround worked?

I’m not sure. What I’m doing is creating a placeholder object:

    @Override
    protected FrameLayout createViewInstance(ThemedReactContext context) {
        mFrameLayout = new FrameLayout(context);
        return mFrameLayout;
    }

And then actually doing the work of adding the activity-dependent view to the FrameLayout later on when props change.

@foghina any thoughts on this? Seems like something super useful to get fixed.

@nickjanssen that’s actually different from the issue being discussed here. You are extending ReactContextBaseJavaModule, which has access to getCurrentActivity(). See this comment about why you can’t use getCurrentActivity() in the constructor.

This issue is regarding SimpleViewManager extensions not having getCurrentActivity(), which is an issue that still remains in 0.30.0.

+1 I also cannot access Activity any longer, I need it in the constructor phase in order to get a SplashScreen working. Calling getCurrentActivity() in the constructor simply returns null.

public class SplashScreen extends ReactContextBaseJavaModule {

    public SplashScreen(ReactApplicationContext reactContext) {
        super(reactContext);

        getCurrentActivity() // null
    }

It didn’t.