Android - Inner element must either be a resource reference or empty

Question

Error Details

AGPBI: {\"kind\":\"error\",\"text\":\"error: \\u003citem\\u003e inner element must either be a resource reference or empty         


        

Answer 1

In the the values folder I double clicked the ids.xml file this was causing the issue

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <item name="roll_button" type="id">rollButton</item>
</resources>

I tried the some of the voted answers:

<item name="roll_button" type="id">

But I got an error that said:

The element type "item" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</item>".

So to fix I just added the matching ending tag:

<item name="roll_button" type="id"></item>

UPDATE

I'm new to Kotlin so what I just noticed and what I didn't realize is the <item name="roll_button" type="id" /> needs the forward slash at the end to go before the closing >. If you don't include it then you will get the error I got but if you do include it the accepted answer works.

Answer 2

I had below error

error: <item> inner element must either be a resource reference or empty.

In my case I created new test project and deleted the toolbar and fab from activity_main.xml file but these were also in ids.xml file. After deleting both ids from ids.xml file I was able to run. In your ids.xml file you may have lots of ID's but as I created a new project So, It has No IDs.

In above screenshot you can see the exact file location.

Answer 3

I simply created this auto-generated file in res/xml/values with empty tags like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    ...
    <item type="id" name="icon" />
    ...
</resources>

That did the trick!

Answer 4

On your Resource File remove the closing tag plus the Body i.e Remove "tv_deviceName"

and let your resource file be like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <item name="tv_deviceName" type="id"/>
</resources>

Answer 5

When declaring id in resources, the body should be empty

<item
    type="id"
    name="id_name" />

For more info please have a look on below link

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/more-resources#Id

So as Oliver Manyasa mentioned, it should be as below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <item name="tv_deviceName" type="id"/>
</resources>

Answer 6

I had a similar issue after upgrading to Android Studio 3.2.1

The error was pointing to this item in ids.xml file

<item name="mnuActivate" type="id">Activation</item>

As mentioned by the user Sangeet Suresh, I changed it to

<item name="mnuActivate" type="id" />

That fixed the issue.