Question

I am using a PreferenceActivity to show some settings for my application. I am inflating the settings via a xml file so that my onCreate (and complete class methods) looks like this:

public class FooActivity extends PreferenceActivity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {
        super.onCreate(icicle);
        addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preference);
    }
}

The javadoc of PreferenceActivity PreferenceFragment states that

These preferences will automatically save to SharedPreferences as the user interacts with them. To retrieve an instance of SharedPreferences that the preference hierarchy in this activity will use, call getDefaultSharedPreferences(android.content.Context) with a context in the same package as this activity.

But how I get the name of the SharedPreference in another Activity? I can only call

getSharedPreferences(name, mode)

in the other activity but I need the name of the SharedPreference which was used by the PreferenceActivity. What is the name or how can i retrieve it?

Answer 1

import android.preference.PreferenceManager;
SharedPreferences prefs = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(this);
// then you use
prefs.getBoolean("keystring", true);

Update

According to Shared Preferences | Android Developer Tutorial (Part 13) by Sai Geetha M N,

Many applications may provide a way to capture user preferences on the
settings of a specific application or an activity. For supporting
this, Android provides a simple set of APIs.

Preferences are typically name value pairs. They can be stored as
“Shared Preferences” across various activities in an application (note
currently it cannot be shared across processes). Or it can be
something that needs to be stored specific to an activity.

1. Shared Preferences: The shared preferences can be used by all the components (activities, services etc) of the applications.

2. Activity handled preferences: These preferences can only be used within the particular activity and can not be used by other components of the application.

Shared Preferences:

The shared preferences are managed with the help of getSharedPreferences method of the Context class. The preferences are stored in a default file (1) or you can specify a file name (2) to be used to refer to the preferences.

(1) The recommended way is to use by the default mode, without specifying the file name

SharedPreferences preferences = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(context);

(2) Here is how you get the instance when you specify the file name

public static final String PREF_FILE_NAME = "PrefFile";
SharedPreferences preferences = getSharedPreferences(PREF_FILE_NAME, MODE_PRIVATE);

MODE_PRIVATE is the operating mode for the preferences. It is the default mode and means the created file will be accessed by only the calling application. Other two modes supported are MODE_WORLD_READABLE and MODE_WORLD_WRITEABLE. In MODE_WORLD_READABLE other application can read the created file but can not modify it. In case of MODE_WORLD_WRITEABLE other applications also have write permissions for the created file.

Finally, once you have the preferences instance, here is how you can retrieve the stored values from the preferences:

int storedPreference = preferences.getInt("storedInt", 0);

To store values in the preference file SharedPreference.Editor object has to be used. Editor is a nested interface in the SharedPreference class.

SharedPreferences.Editor editor = preferences.edit();
editor.putInt("storedInt", storedPreference); // value to store
editor.commit();

Editor also supports methods like remove() and clear() to delete the preference values from the file.

Activity Preferences:

The shared preferences can be used by other application components. But if you do not need to share the preferences with other components and want to have activity private preferences you can do that with the help of getPreferences() method of the activity. The getPreference method uses the getSharedPreferences() method with the name of the activity class for the preference file name.

Following is the code to get preferences

SharedPreferences preferences = getPreferences(MODE_PRIVATE);
int storedPreference = preferences.getInt("storedInt", 0);

The code to store values is also the same as in case of shared preferences.

SharedPreferences preferences = getPreference(MODE_PRIVATE);
SharedPreferences.Editor editor = preferences.edit();
editor.putInt("storedInt", storedPreference); // value to store
editor.commit();

You can also use other methods like storing the activity state in database. Note Android also contains a package called android.preference. The package defines classes to implement application preferences UI.

To see some more examples check Android’s Data Storage post on developers site.