Transferring Assets

To send large blobs of binary data over the Bluetooth transport, such as images, attach an Asset to a data item and the put the data item into the replicated data store.

Assets automatically handle caching of data to prevent retransmission and conserve Bluetooth bandwidth. A common pattern is for a handheld app to download an image, shrink it to an appropriate size for display on the wearable, and transmit it to the wearable app as an asset. The following examples demonstrate this pattern.

Note: Although the size of data items is limited to 100KB, assets can be as large as desired. However, transferring large assets affects the user experience in many cases, so test your apps to ensure that they perform well if you're transferring large assets.

Transfer an Asset

Create the asset using one of the create...() methods in the Asset class. Here, we convert a bitmap to a byte stream and then call createFromBytes() to create the asset.

private static Asset createAssetFromBitmap(Bitmap bitmap) {
    final ByteArrayOutputStream byteStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, byteStream);
    return Asset.createFromBytes(byteStream.toByteArray());
}

When you have an asset, attach it to a data item with the putAsset() method in DataMap or PutDataRequest and then put the data item into the data store with putDataItem():

Using PutDataRequest

Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.image);
Asset asset = createAssetFromBitmap(bitmap);
PutDataRequest request = PutDataRequest.create("/image");
request.putAsset("profileImage", asset);
Wearable.DataApi.putDataItem(mGoogleApiClient, request);

Using PutDataMapRequest

Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.image);
Asset asset = createAssetFromBitmap(bitmap);
PutDataMapRequest dataMap = PutDataMapRequest.create("/image");
dataMap.getDataMap().putAsset("profileImage", asset)
PutDataRequest request = dataMap.asPutDataRequest();
PendingResult<DataApi.DataItemResult> pendingResult = Wearable.DataApi
        .putDataItem(mGoogleApiClient, request);

Receive assets

When an asset is created, you probably want to read and extract it on other side of the connection. Here's an example of how to implement the callback to detect an asset change and extract the asset:

@Override
public void onDataChanged(DataEventBuffer dataEvents) {
  for (DataEvent event : dataEvents) {
    if (event.getType() == DataEvent.TYPE_CHANGED &&
        event.getDataItem().getUri().getPath().equals("/image")) {
      DataMapItem dataMapItem = DataMapItem.fromDataItem(event.getDataItem());
      Asset profileAsset = dataMapItem.getDataMap().getAsset("profileImage");
      Bitmap bitmap = loadBitmapFromAsset(profileAsset);
      // Do something with the bitmap
    }
  }
}

public Bitmap loadBitmapFromAsset(Asset asset) {
    if (asset == null) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("Asset must be non-null");
    }
    ConnectionResult result =
           mGoogleApiClient.blockingConnect(TIMEOUT_MS, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
    if (!result.isSuccess()) {
        return null;
    }
    // convert asset into a file descriptor and block until it's ready
    InputStream assetInputStream = Wearable.DataApi.getFdForAsset(
            mGoogleApiClient, asset).await().getInputStream();
            mGoogleApiClient.disconnect();

    if (assetInputStream == null) {
        Log.w(TAG, "Requested an unknown Asset.");
        return null;
    }
    // decode the stream into a bitmap
    return BitmapFactory.decodeStream(assetInputStream);
}