Question

I am developing an app that needs to refer to data in a number of XML files. There are a lot ( ~40) XML files required by the app.

The file have names like “AbnormalFlags-v1.0.xml” and I current have them located in

res/raw/v2/AbnormalFlags-v1.0.xml
res/raw/v2/ActualDeliveryPlace-v1.0.xml
res/raw/v2/AddressType-v1.0.xml … …

A number of questions

• Is this the best place to locate these files ?
• The filenames seem to be a problem, will that cause issues

• Because I have to dynamically determine which file to use I use the:

  xmlFile = getApplicationContext().getResources().getIdentifier(xmlFileId,"raw","com.apps4health.refpack");

This does not find the resource file, where am I going wrong ?

Answer 1

Given the format of the file names I would suggest you to save them in the assets folder. Create a folder named assets inside the res folder and put there the XML files.

The code below shows how to open files in the assets directory:

InputStream is = null;
try {
   AssetManager am = getApplicationContext().getAssets();
   is = am.open("AbnormalFlags-v1.0.xml");
   // Process the XML file from "is"...
}catch( IOException e ) { 
   // Handle exception
}

AssetManager is responsible to open files saved in the res/assets folder. You just call the open() method passing the file name as argument.