how to access the drawable resources by name in android

Question

In my application, I need to get the some bitmap drawables somewhere where I do not want to keep the reference R. So I create a class DrawableManager to manage the drawables.

public class DrawableManager {     private static Context context = null;      public static void init(Context c) {         context = c;     }      public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {         return R.drawable.?     } } 

Then I want to get the drawable by name somewhere like this( the car.png is put inside the res/drawables):

Drawable d= DrawableManager.getDrawable("car.png"); 

However as you can see, I can not access the resources by the name:

public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {     return R.drawable.? } 

Any alternatives?

Answer 1

Note that your approach is almost always the wrong way to do things (better to pass the context into the object itself that is using the drawable than keeping a static Context somewhere).

Given that, if you want to do dynamic drawable loading, you can use getIdentifier:

Resources resources = context.getResources(); final int resourceId = resources.getIdentifier(name, "drawable",     context.getPackageName()); return resources.getDrawable(resourceId); 

Answer 2

You could do something like this.-

public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {     Context context = YourApplication.getContext();     int resourceId = context.getResources().getIdentifier(name, "drawable", YourApplication.getContext().getPackageName());     return context.getResources().getDrawable(resourceId); } 

In order to access the context from anywhere, you may extend Application class.-

public class YourApplication extends Application {      private static YourApplication instance;      public YourApplication() {         instance = this;     }      public static Context getContext() {         return instance;     } } 

And map it in your Manifest application tag

<application     android:name=".YourApplication"     ....