Android: Organizing Strings and String Arrays in res/values

Question

I am working on a project that includes a lot of strings and string arrays. I would like to put them into created folders inside res/values, but I get errors when I try to do this. Either getRecources() does not recognize the new folder or the xml attributes cannot link together. I know this is a noob-ish question, but thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you can't create any subfolders in your values folder. But you have two instruments to control the hierarchy.

String arrays are declared in the following way:

<string-array name="arr_name">
    <item>Text</item>
    <item>Another text</item>
</string-array>

You can access them through R.array.arr_name.

Prefixes are kind of obvious, but since you mentioned that you are a novice, it's worth mentioning. I usually prefix all of my strings depending on how they are used. For example, btn_ for the text used on buttons, dialog_ for strings used in dialogs and so on. This way autocomplete in the IDE also works much better too.

Also you can split your declarations into different files, but this doesn't have any impact at all on the way you access them, so I don't know if this can help you.