Android, getting resource ID from string?

Question

I need to pass a resource ID to a method in one of my classes. It needs to use both the id that the reference points to and also it needs the string. How should I best achie

Answer 1

@EboMike: I didn't know that Resources.getIdentifier() existed.

In my projects I used the following code to do that:

public static int getResId(String resName, Class<?> c) {

    try {
        Field idField = c.getDeclaredField(resName);
        return idField.getInt(idField);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return -1;
    } 
}

It would be used like this for getting the value of R.drawable.icon resource integer value

int resID = getResId("icon", R.drawable.class); // or other resource class

I just found a blog post saying that Resources.getIdentifier() is slower than using reflection like I did. Check it out.

Answer 2

If you need to pair a string and an int, then how about a Map?

static Map<String, Integer> icons = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

static {
    icons.add("icon1", R.drawable.icon);
    icons.add("icon2", R.drawable.othericon);
    icons.add("someicon", R.drawable.whatever);
}