Using list preference in Android

Question

I have a text to speech application where the user can select a language and also select a male or female voice. The problem is that for each language there are different strings used to called the male and female voice but in my preference I only have two options (male and female).

<string-array name="Language">     <item>English (US)</item>     <item>English (UK)</item>     <item>French (France)</item>     <item>Spanish (Spain)</item>     <item>Italian</item> </string-array>  <string-array name="languageAlias">     <item>"en-US"</item>     <item>"en-GB"</item>     <item>"fr-FR"</item>     <item>"es-ES"</item>     <item>"it-IT"</item> </string-array>  <string-array name="Voice">     <item>Male</item>     <item>Female</item> </string-array>  <string-array name="VoiceAlias">     <item>"usenglishmale"</item>     <item>"usenglishfemale"</item>     <item>"ukenglishmale"</item>     <item>"ukenglishfemale"</item>     <item>"eurfrenchmale"</item>     <item>"eurfrenchfemale"</item>     <item>"eurspanishmale"</item>     <item>"eurspanishfemale"</item>     <item>"euritalianmale"</item>     <item>"euritalianfemale"</item>         </string-array> 

I'm trying to find a way to only reference the relevant male and female voiceAlias depending on the language selected. Is it possible to do this here or do I have to write some code which changes the values of the voiceAlias array depending on the language selected?

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Ok, you can accomplish this with two ListPreferences and an OnPreferenceChangeListener for each. First the XML:

<ListPreference      android:key="language_preference"     android:title="Language"     android:entries="@array/Language"     android:entryValues="@array/languageAlias"/>  <ListPreference      android:key="gender_preference"     android:title="Gender"     android:entries="@array/Voice"     android:entryValues="@array/VoiceData"/> 

Let's make a new entry in res/values/array.xml:

<string-array name="VoiceData">     <item>0</item>     <item>1</item> </string-array> 

And now in your extention of PreferenceActivity, we're going to take the string values which persist in your SharedPreferences and from them create a completely new entry in the SharedPreferences which gets its value from "VoiceAlias".

SharedPreferences shareprefs = getPreferenceManager().getSharedPreferences(); Resources resources = YourContext.getResources();  private void makeVoiceData() {     String languageData = shareprefs.getString("language_preference", "en-US");     int genderData = Integer.parseInt(shareprefs.getString("gender_preference", "0"));     String[] voiceAlias = resources.getStringArray(R.array.VoiceAlias);      int a = 0     String[] languageAlias = resources.getStringArray(R.array.languageAlias);     for (a ; a < languageAlias.length ; a++) {         if (languageAlias[a].equals(languageData)) {             break;         }     }      shareprefs.putString("VoiceAlias", voiceAlias[(2 * a) + genderData]); }  ListPreference language_preference = getPreference("language_preference"); ListPreference gender_preference = getPreference("gender_preference");  language_preference.setOnPreferenceChangeListener(new OnPreferenceChangeListener() {     public boolean onPreferenceChanged(Preference preference, Object newValue) {         shareprefs.putString("language_preference", (String) newValue);         makeVoiceData();     } });  gender_preference.setOnPreferenceChangeListener(new OnPreferenceChangeListener() {     public boolean onPreferenceChanged(Preference preference, Object newValue) {         shareprefs.putString("gender_preference", (String) newValue);         makeVoiceData();     } }); 

Answer 2

String arrays can use string resources. This is the easiest (and probably simplest) way to translate user values.

<string-array name="user_values">     <item>@string/value_1</item>     <item>@string/value_2</item> </string-array> 

See Working with Strings and String Arrays