AirplaneModeHelper

Flowchart

Screenshots

 Setting’s root panel

Introduction

For developers, AirplaneMode is a complicated service that has deep relationships between different services like Bluetooth, Wifi and MobileConnections. Because these services are all related to hardwares, there must be some round-trip time that you have to wait. In order to make these operations encapsulated, they are all handled in system/js/airplane_mode.js. and we think the other apps should just use a trigger to tell System app to do following works.

But due to the restriction that we can’t easily communicate across apps easily, we have to use some internal settings key to communicate. But in order to make sure other apps won’t directly manipulate the communication key that would break the other apps, we think the better way is to design an unified helper for everyone to use, and all these details will be hidden within APIs which it exposes and that’s why we need AirplaneModeHelper (its abbreviation would be AMH, and related file would be shared/js/airplane_mode_helper.js).

If you check below flowchart, you can notice that there are some useful API like ready(), setEnabled(), getStatus(), addEventListener() and removeEventListener() that you can use to build up your business logics. Take Settings app for example, there is a toggle in its root panel and users can click on it to enable / disable AirplaneMode, we use AMH to manipulate it and make sure we will block UI when enabling/disabling and unblock UI when enabled/disabled.

So with AMH, you can do whatever you want which relates to AirplaneMode, while for more details, please check its source code and flowchart below.