Android: Accessing string.xml using variable name

Question

I want to display a message to the user depending upon a prompt I receive from another part of the program. There can be a number of prompts & they are stored in an enum.

These are my prompts:

Defs.java

public enum Prompt
{
    PromptA,
    PromptB,
    PromptC,
}

I have the externalized strings stored in resources on these lines:

res/values/strings.xml

<string name="PromptA">Error in execution</string>
<string name="PromptB">Process completed successfully</string>
<string name="PromptC">Please try again</string>

Now in my main Activity screen a method is called by some other part:

public void showPrompt(Prompt prompt) {
    String message = getString(R.string.<**what-do-I-put-here?**>);
    //show a dialog box with message
}

I know this can be done with a huge if-else block (there are tons of prompts in the actual application) or a switch statement. It will be really ugly.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

See Resources.getIdentifier: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/res/Resources.html#getIdentifier%28java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String%29 . You can try something like this:

public void showPrompt(Prompt prompt, String label) {
    String message = (String) getResources().getText(getResources().getIdentifier(label, "string", null));
    //show a dialog box with message
}

Try that out and see what that does for you.

EDIT: meh. Try this instead.

public void showPrompt(Prompt prompt, String label) {
    String message = (String) getResources().getText(getResources().getIdentifier(label, "string", "<application package class>"));
    //show a dialog box with message
}

Turns out you have to specify the your package identifier (so if your AndroidManifest.xml has com.blah.blah.blah as the Package put that in the third parameter.