Is it possible to create a VectorDrawable from File System (*.xml File)

Question

I am trying to use VectorDrawables in my Android App.
I want to load an xml File from the File System and get an Instance of android.graphics.Drawable to displa

Answer 1

Unfortunately, no. Not unless you somehow compile the XML source file in the way that resources are compiled. VectorDrawable currently assumes a compiled image source.

Otherwise you could probably have written something like this:

VectorDrawable d = new VectorDrawable();
try( InputStream in = new FileInputStream( *Path to File* ); )
{
    XmlPullParser p = Xml.newPullParser();
    p.setInput( in, /*encoding, self detect*/null );
    d.inflate( getResources(), p, Xml.asAttributeSet(p) ); // FAILS
}

Currently that fails (API level 23, Marshmallow 6.0) because the inflate call attempts to cast the attribute set to an XmlBlock.Parser, which throws a ClassCastException. The cause is documented in the source; it will “only work with compiled XML files”, such as resources packaged by the aapt tool.