Android: Accessing resources without an Activity or Context refeerence

Question

I am posting this question in the hope that I can get some kind of definitive answer.

Is it really impossible to access resources without an activity or context reference. Passing around such references when all that is required is to access some values or assets or strings which have nothing to do with the UI makes for overly complicated code.

Plus all those potential hanging references.

Also this completely ruins various Design Patterns such as singletons, having to supply parameters when getting the instance.

Putting a static reference

So is there a way or does the whole community just live with this problem.

Answer 1

Your resources are bundled to a context, it's a fact and you can't change that.

Here's what you can do:

Extend Application, get the application context and use that as a static helper.

public class App extends Application {

    private static Context mContext;

    public static Resources getResources() {
        return mContext.getResources();
    }

    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        mContext = getApplicationContext();
    }
}

Your manifest:

<application
    android:icon="@drawable/icon"
    android:label="@string/app_name"
    android:name="your.package.path.to.App">