I have an old computer: Pentium D 2.8 Ghz, 4 gig ram, win7 ult., running eclipse Helios and jdk1.6. I recently started learning android development and was going through some exercises people posted on the web. During one exercise which basically creates an option menu, it asked to create a menu folder under /res and a xml file to define the menu elements. In eclipse, I right click on the res folder to choose to create a new folder –> that’s fine but you can hear my computer fan picks up, then I create a black file and name it “menu.xml” and double click to open it, my computer processor pick up to max by javaw.exe and eclipse stops responding (indicated by windows). If you watch the javaw.exe in the task manager, the amount of memory it uses just keeps adding up (up to 1gig, i then killed the process manually).
I did the same thing but this time, rather than create the menu folder, i just created the menu.xml file under “layout” folder and everything is fine. So is this a bug in android / eclipse? This is not a one time occurrence, it happens every time when i repeat the steps above — including after rebooting the computer and start fresh.
Any ideas?
I can recreate this problem on latest Eclipse on Linux. I’m pretty sure it’s a bug in the ADT that tries to validate an empty XML menu resource and gets stuck in an infinite loop, eventually causing a StackOverflow. It doesn’t seem to happen for any other folder in res, so it must be related to menu inflation. You may want to submit this to Eclipse or AOSP.
Either way, the ADT plugin provides a wizard for creating XML files, use that. On the toolbar, it’s the icon with an ‘a’ in it and a + in the upper right corner. Or you can use File > New > Other > Android > Android XML File, and create a Menu resource.
Update: after some googling, I found this thread on the android-developer mailing list. Apparently it’s a known issue, and you should use the Android XML Resource wizard as described above.