How to change the back button behaviour

ometimes, when developing Android applications, there is a need to override the default behaviour of the back button which means assigning another behavior for the ‘Back’ button. Although changing the behaviour of back button is not recommended, but there are some situations where changing the ‘back’ button behavior is mandatory, such as to avoid accidentally finishing or closing the current Activity.

For example, a text editor, should confirm if the user really wants to quit without saving the current changes, or a game, that check if it is the player’s intention to close the current game session.

Quick LinksLet us write few lines of code to change the default behavior of ‘back’ button. To start with, I assume you are going to test our code in Android devices having OS version 2.0 or above.

• Code Listings
• Demo
• Download Source Code

Code Listings

There is a ‘back’ key press event available in Android with which we can assign different behaviour for ‘back’ button press event:

1 2 3 4 5

@Override public void onBackPressed() {      //Include the code here      return ; }

For lower versions below Android 2.0, we need to handle the ‘back’ button press event in different way as there is no onBackPressed() method available.

All we need to do is, override the onKeyDown() method and check if ‘back’ button has been pressed:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

@Override  public boolean onKeyDown( int keyCode, KeyEvent event){           //Changes 'back' button action           if (keyCode==KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK)           {            //Include the code here          }           return true ;       }

I just created a simple application which will ask the user to confirm leaving the application when the user presses the ‘back’ button:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

package com.prgguru.example;   import android.app.Activity; import android.app.AlertDialog; import android.content.DialogInterface; import android.os.Bundle; import android.widget.Toast;   public class AndroidBackButtonActivity extends Activity {        @Override      public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {          super .onCreate(savedInstanceState);          setContentView(R.layout.main);          Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "http://android.programmerguru.com" , Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();      }        @Override      public void onBackPressed() {          //Display alert message when back button has been pressed          backButtonHandler();          return ;      }        public void backButtonHandler() {          AlertDialog.Builder alertDialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(                  AndroidBackButtonActivity. this );          // Setting Dialog Title          alertDialog.setTitle( "Leave application?" );          // Setting Dialog Message          alertDialog.setMessage( "Are you sure you want to leave the application?" );          // Setting Icon to Dialog          alertDialog.setIcon(R.drawable.dialog_icon);          // Setting Positive "Yes" Button          alertDialog.setPositiveButton( "YES" ,                  new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {                      public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {                          finish();                      }                  });          // Setting Negative "NO" Button          alertDialog.setNegativeButton( "NO" ,                  new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {                      public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {                          // Write your code here to invoke NO event                          dialog.cancel();                      }                  });          // Showing Alert Message          alertDialog.show();      } }