Hiding android.R resources in Android Studio 1.3+ autocomplete

Question

Is it possible to configure Android Studio to display only the @drawable resources that are inside the project folder?

The project I'm working on is an Industry project and rarely requires me to use R resources.

Answer 1

Looking through the AS's 'Code Completion' section, I didn't find any setting which allows to hide the SDK resources and use the app/lib resources instead:

The recently implemented feature, mentioned by StefMa, probably will not help you as it works the other way: it allows library developers to hide some of the resources from the aar package and show only selected portion of resources, aka public recources. Chris Banes made a good intro in this feature here.

Answer 2

I don't think you can do that actually, only library developers can choose to hide the resources in their aar distributions.

So you are dependent on library developers to do that for you. Luckily the latest Android support library should already have done this for you.

The way library developers can hide resources in their library is:

1. Create a new folder on the same level as res called res-public (name not important) with a subfolder called values:

src
    main
         java
         res
         res-public
             values

2. In that folder create a new file called public.xml, where you define all resources that you want to have public with their name followed by type

<resources>
    <public type="drawable" name="btn_login"/>
</resources>

3. Then make sure to reference this new folder in your build.gradle file:

android {
    compileSdkVersion 21
    buildToolsVersion "21.1.2"

    sourceSets {
        main.res.srcDirs 'res', 'res-public'
    }

    defaultConfig {
       ...
    }
}

4. Make sure you are using at least version 1.3 of the Gradle plugin

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.3.0'
    }
}

5. Compile your library into an aar file and include that into your project. Only the btn_login resource will now be visible.
   • Check here how to include a local aar file, so you can test without pushing to a Maven repo.