Question

I have an XML index in the res/xml/ folder, and I would like it to include other xml files, so that when I parse R.xml.index, all the files are merged into a single resource.

I tried to adapt the include layout trick to xml parsing, so my index.xml looks like that :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Index xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<Sheet>
    <include xml="o_2sq_m.xml"/>
    <include xml="o_2sq_r.xml"/>
</Sheet>
<Sheet>
    <include xml="o_sq_tr_m.xml"/>
    <include xml="o_sq_tr_r.xml"/>
</Sheet>
</Index>

and the file o_2sq_m.xml, which is in the same folder as index.xml, looks like that:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Challenge xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<Dimensions maxX="512" maxY="342" />
<Point id="1" x="94" y="101" color="0x00000000" />
...
</Challenge>

But when I parse index.xml with and XmlPullParser, I see in the debugger that it parses the include tags without having them unrolled, i.e. it does not access the tree of the file o_2sq_m.xml

What should I do to have android include the files within one other ?

Answer 1

If you are not doing too much XML import (such as at create time), you could use getResources().getIdentifier(), which for an index like that (remove the .xml in the attribute)

<Index xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
<Sheet>
    <include customAttr="o_2sq_m"/> ...
</Sheet>

and given that your file to be included is named o_2sq_m.xml, you could use the following code:

switch(tag) {
case "include" :
   String xmlid = xpp.getAttributeValue(null, "customAttr");
   Int xmlIncludedId = res.getIdentifier(xmlid, "xml", getPackageName());
   if(xmlIncludedId != 0) {
     // Here the xmlIncludedId can be used to import other XML files.
     // E.g. getResources().getXml(xmlIncludedId) returns an XmlResourceParser
   }