Android: compiling 9-patch files to be used outside of the drawable folder?

Question

I have a need to load 9-patch files from outside of the drawable folder. This is so that my application can download new skins from a server, for example. I have discovered that a 9-patch image stored in the drawable folder is compiled when the .apk is made. The exact same file read from the assets folder does not have the 9-patch chunk. Thus the act of making the .apk is compiling the source 9-patch files in the drawable folder, but not in the assets directory.

How can I compile a 9-patch file myself, so that I can install it in the assets directory? Is there a (batch) tool to convert the source to the compiled version with the 9-patch chunk? I'd really, really like not having to use Eclipse/Ant to build an .apk and then pick it apart to extract the compiled 9-patch file if at all possible.

For now I just want to be able to read from the assets directory (for example, have a sub directory per skin) to keep it simple. The next step is to compile the source image to add in the 9-patch chunk. After that I'll worry about downloading on the fly to the /data folder - if I can't compile the 9-patch file then there's little point in adding server side effort.

Answer 1

There is no simple way to do this afaik. 9-patch compilation is done by aapt and is rather simple: it discards the black borders and encodes their content inside a PNG chunk. It would be fairly trivial for you to write a tool that does something similar. Note that you don't even need to use the same format. If you look at the various NinePatch APIs in the doc, you will see that you can submit your own "chunk" (which encodes the stretch regions and padding.) The structure of a chunk byte[] array is explained here:

/**
 * This chunk specifies how to split an image into segments for
 * scaling.
 *
 * There are J horizontal and K vertical segments.  These segments divide
 * the image into J*K regions as follows (where J=4 and K=3):
 *
 *      F0   S0    F1     S1
 *   +-----+----+------+-------+
 * S2|  0  |  1 |  2   |   3   |
 *   +-----+----+------+-------+
 *   |     |    |      |       |
 *   |     |    |      |       |
 * F2|  4  |  5 |  6   |   7   |
 *   |     |    |      |       |
 *   |     |    |      |       |
 *   +-----+----+------+-------+
 * S3|  8  |  9 |  10  |   11  |
 *   +-----+----+------+-------+
 *
 * Each horizontal and vertical segment is considered to by either
 * stretchable (marked by the Sx labels) or fixed (marked by the Fy
 * labels), in the horizontal or vertical axis, respectively. In the
 * above example, the first is horizontal segment (F0) is fixed, the
 * next is stretchable and then they continue to alternate. Note that
 * the segment list for each axis can begin or end with a stretchable
 * or fixed segment.
 *
 * The relative sizes of the stretchy segments indicates the relative
 * amount of stretchiness of the regions bordered by the segments.  For
 * example, regions 3, 7 and 11 above will take up more horizontal space
 * than regions 1, 5 and 9 since the horizontal segment associated with
 * the first set of regions is larger than the other set of regions.  The
 * ratios of the amount of horizontal (or vertical) space taken by any
 * two stretchable slices is exactly the ratio of their corresponding
 * segment lengths.
 *
 * xDivs and yDivs point to arrays of horizontal and vertical pixel
 * indices.  The first pair of Divs (in either array) indicate the
 * starting and ending points of the first stretchable segment in that
 * axis. The next pair specifies the next stretchable segment, etc. So
 * in the above example xDiv[0] and xDiv[1] specify the horizontal
 * coordinates for the regions labeled 1, 5 and 9.  xDiv[2] and
 * xDiv[3] specify the coordinates for regions 3, 7 and 11. Note that
 * the leftmost slices always start at x=0 and the rightmost slices
 * always end at the end of the image. So, for example, the regions 0,
 * 4 and 8 (which are fixed along the X axis) start at x value 0 and
 * go to xDiv[0] and slices 2, 6 and 10 start at xDiv[1] and end at
 * xDiv[2].
 *
 * The array pointed to by the colors field lists contains hints for
 * each of the regions.  They are ordered according left-to-right and
 * top-to-bottom as indicated above. For each segment that is a solid
 * color the array entry will contain that color value; otherwise it
 * will contain NO_COLOR.  Segments that are completely transparent
 * will always have the value TRANSPARENT_COLOR.
 *
 * The PNG chunk type is "npTc".
 */
struct Res_png_9patch
{
    Res_png_9patch() : wasDeserialized(false), xDivs(NULL),
                       yDivs(NULL), colors(NULL) { }

    int8_t wasDeserialized;
    int8_t numXDivs;
    int8_t numYDivs;
    int8_t numColors;

    // These tell where the next section of a patch starts.
    // For example, the first patch includes the pixels from
    // 0 to xDivs[0]-1 and the second patch includes the pixels
    // from xDivs[0] to xDivs[1]-1.
    // Note: allocation/free of these pointers is left to the caller.
    int32_t* xDivs;
    int32_t* yDivs;

    int32_t paddingLeft, paddingRight;
    int32_t paddingTop, paddingBottom;

    enum {
        // The 9 patch segment is not a solid color.
        NO_COLOR = 0x00000001,

        // The 9 patch segment is completely transparent.
        TRANSPARENT_COLOR = 0x00000000
    };
    // Note: allocation/free of this pointer is left to the caller.
    uint32_t* colors;

    // Convert data from device representation to PNG file representation.
    void deviceToFile();
    // Convert data from PNG file representation to device representation.
    void fileToDevice();
    // Serialize/Marshall the patch data into a newly malloc-ed block
    void* serialize();
    // Serialize/Marshall the patch data
    void serialize(void* outData);
    // Deserialize/Unmarshall the patch data
    static Res_png_9patch* deserialize(const void* data);
    // Compute the size of the serialized data structure
    size_t serializedSize();
};