Module Dependency - Android Studio

Question

I've 2 modules under my project M1, M2

Project
  - M1
  - M2

Earlier, I had M1 as my primary application. However, there was a need for new application M2 that shared lot of common stuff with M1. So, I created a new module M2 with M1 as dependency.

To achieve this, I've modified build.gradle of M1 and M2 as follows:

M2:

compile project(':M1')

M1: (Changed to library)

apply plugin: 'com.android.library'

However, this doesn't work and throws up error:

Could not find property 'applicationVariants' on com.android.build.gradle.LibraryExtension_Decorated@6de81701.

Any idea, on how to solve this issue ?

Answer 1

From the docs:

In Android projects, this is a bit more complicated because there could be a large number of the same task and their name is generated based on the Build Types and Product Flavors.

In order to fix this, the android object has two properties:

applicationVariants (only for the app plugin)

libraryVariants (only for the library plugin)

testVariants (for both plugins)

All three return a DomainObjectCollection of ApplicationVariant, LibraryVariant, and TestVariant objects respectively.

http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/user-guide

So it seems that your build.gradle in M1 uses the property applicationVariants which is not applicable to library projects. Since I don't know what you are doing exactly I can just guess that you either need to (1) replace that with libraryVariants or (2) move it to the build.gradle of M2.