Enable/Disable MediaElement foreground service.

[Pmr-precure]

I would like to request an option to disable the foreground service when using MediaElement on Android. Currently, MediaElement initiates a foreground service by default during media playback.
In our case we use MediaElement for tutorials and already have a Foreground service running with information about our connected BLE devices. In that case it would be nice not having the MediaElements notification aswell.

[mrucker]

I agree, this wouldn't even be incredibly difficult. For example, the ServiceAttribute could be removed from MediaControlsService, and instructions could be added to the documentation instructing users to add the appropriate service and intent filters to the manifest if they want it. Also, you would need to remove the foreground permission declarations at the top of MauiMediaElement.

[ne0rrmatrix]

We discussed this today in our monthly meeting. I will be opening a discussion to implement this feature as it wanted by the community and should be easy to implement. If you watch the youtube stream you will see it at the end of the stream near the very end.

[bijington]

I like the idea but it sadly won't work because the compiler directives apply to the code being compiled - for app developers they are only compiling their code, the toolkit will already have been compiled so the directive would be too late.

I like the idea of possibly sticking the permission attributes in our codebase which will only be retained if the developer refers to the code that has the attributes applied. I don't know if this is possible though because these types of attributes are applied to the assembly I think.

It would be amazing for developers to write something like:

builder.UseCommunityToolkitMedia(
    options => options.EnableForegroundService = true);

Perhaps some form of source generation could help to solve this

[mrucker]

Ha ha. Of course 😄. My brain went for an obvious solution and skipped right past the fact that Nuget packages are deployed as compiled code. I agree, configuring the foreground service permission through the existing builder API would be great.

I've been doing a lot of reading. I think it might be possible to achieve the desired builder interface if you create a custom BuildTask, but this is far outside of my development experience and expertise. The code that auto-magically turns UsesPermissionAttribute into permissions in the manifest is here which is called from this Build Task. Maintaining such a complex solution, however, is probably worse than dealing with the disruption to the community by changing default behavior.

[bijington]

I think I would agree that it might be less effort to point developers to the documentation. That said this is a good discussion, perhaps someone else will come in with an alternative suggestion?

A further thought I had was (and this might be more effort still) to introduce a second Media based NuGet package that explicitly adds the foreground service support on top of the existing implementation, this would provide an easy opt-in for developers and hopefully an easy way to automatically register the permissions required.

[JoacimWall]

Hi
Is there any status update on this one?
//Joacim

[mrucker]

Hi @JoacimWall, I'm not sure but, I'll reiterate what I said above in case it helps. It is very easy to remove the permissions in the CommunityToolkit code yourself and build a custom package from source. That's what my project has done. It took us like half an hour to get it all hooked up, and we've been good to go for several months now.