Bundle containsKey() but returns null on getString()

Back to blogging after a long time, and this time its quite a lame one which I usually wouldn't want to blog about, but I did spend close to an hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

I just started a small android application and was trying to send a paramter from one Activity to another. Now, after a bit of searching around, I found out that I needed to create an Intent Bundle and put the parameter in it, and the new Activity which gets started will be able to fetch it from the same Bundle using the key that was provided while inserting data into the Bundle.

So, I had something like this in the first activity:

Intent intent = new Intent(FirstActivity.this, SecondActivity.class);
EditText nameText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.query_textbox);
intent.putExtra("queryKey", nameText.getText());
startActivity(intent);


and something like this in the second activity:

Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras();
String query = extras.getString("queryKey");


I was a bit disappointed to find out that query was null. I put a check to see if the key "queryKey" existed in the Bundle like this:

extras.containsKey("queryKey");


which evaluated to true and to support it further, I could even see in the debugger that it was present along with the value which was passed. That's when I started looking at what I did when I inserted the data using putExtra(). The value that was being inserted was of the type Editable but I was trying to retrieve it using getString() which was clearly not the right thing to do. It was quite silly on my part to have expected that to work earlier.

Finally, making the change to ensure that the value which gets passed on is a simple String rather than an Editable object, fixed the issue. This is what I had to do:

Intent intent = new Intent(FirstActivity.this, SecondActivity.class);
EditText nameText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.name_textbox);
intent.putExtra("name", nameText.getText().toString());
startActivity(intent);


One note that I would like to make here is that you need to make sure that the type that you put in the bundle is the same type that you try to retrieve, as in, if the value you put in the bundle is an int then use bundle.getInt() if you don't use the correct one, it will return a null even though the key exists for it.