setText(getString(R.strings.whatever) or setText(R.strings.whatever)?

Question

Both work, obviously if you start concatenating you\'ll need get string in order to avoid displaying an int.

Question: which is the most \'elegant\' or \'recommende

Answer 1

You can add

yourEditText.setText(getResources().getString(R.string.mytext));

because you need get the resource context, after get the string.

Answer 2

Well, since the API provides a method to pass Resource String ID, It seems to be logical to prefer using this. You could actually check the working of setText(resourceid) to see beneath the hood, but setText(R.strings.whatever) is definitely recommended.

Answer 3

The second approach is more elegant, since internally, the TextView (or whatever View-class) will do the job of getting the String for your specified resource.

Letting components do the internal work is always preferred. Also, it is shorter and more readable.

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About the internals I talked about: If you have a look at Androids source-code, you can see that the setText(int)-method of TextView is implemented like this:

public final void setText(int resid) {
  setText(getContext().getResources().getText(resid));
}

So, it internally uses the Context-class to get the string from the resource-id. Now, if you look at the getText()-method (which also comes from the Context-class), you can see that it is implemented the same way:

public final String getString(int resId) {
  return getResources().getString(resId);
}

So for performance or reliability reasons, it makes no difference. Still, it is shorter and more readable.