UIAbility Overview

Overview

UIAbility is a type of application component that provides the UI for user interactions.

The following design philosophy is behind UIAbility:

  1. Native support for cross-device migration and multi-device collaboration at the application component level

  2. Support for multiple device types and window modes

UIAbility is the basic unit of scheduling in OpenHarmony and provides a window for applications to draw the UI. An application can contain one or more UIAbility components. For example, for a payment application, you can use separate UIAbility components to carry the entry and payment functionalities.

Each UIAbility component instance is displayed as a mission in the system application Recents.

You can develop a single UIAbility or multiple UIAbilities for your application based on service requirements.

  • If you want your application to be displayed as one mission in Recents, use one UIAbility and multiple pages.

  • If you want your application to be displayed as multiple missions in Recents or multiple windows to be opened simultaneously, use multiple UIAbilities.

Declaration Configuration

To enable an application to properly use a UIAbility component, declare the UIAbility name, entry, and label under abilities in the module.json5 file.

{
  "module": {
    ...
    "abilities": [
      {
        "name": "EntryAbility", // Name of the UIAbility component.
        "srcEntry": "./ets/entryability/EntryAbility.ets", // Code path of the UIAbility component.
        "description": "$string:EntryAbility_desc", // Description of the UIAbility component.
        "icon": "$media:icon", // Icon of the UIAbility component.
        "label": "$string:EntryAbility_label", // Label of the UIAbility component.
        "startWindowIcon": "$media:icon", // Index of the icon resource file.
        "startWindowBackground": "$color:start_window_background", // Index of the background color resource file.
        ...
      }
    ]
  }
}