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

For me this was actually failing because the new gradle versions. I am pretty sure that some plugins I'm using have incompatibilities with newest gradle. I ended up with success build having the following versions:

gradle-wrapper.properties file:

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.10.1-all.zip

build.gradle file

 dependencies {
   classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1'
 }

EDIT:

As we want to use 3.2.+ versions now, that isn't a reliable solution.

What I ended up doing is creating a new ids.xml file, and overriding all the values that have been conflicting.

ids.xml file example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <resources>
        <item name="cc_card" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_ccv" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_entry" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_entry_internal" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_exp" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_form_layout" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_four_digits" type="id"/>
        <item name="cc_zip" type="id"/>
        <item name="text_helper" type="id"/>
    </resources>

Answer 2

To all others who are still scratching their head to get the solution for this is create ids.xml inside src/main/res/values with contents similar to the following (but make sure to update it with the ids you're seeing errors for):

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<items>
    <item name="animator" type="id"/>
    <item name="date_picker_day" type="id"/>
    <string name="deleted_key"/>
</items>

Now Android Studio will be giving you an error for explicit values and if those values are coming from some library you are using then you can't make a change in the intermediate file so instead change here and while merging your code Android studio takes care of it.