Question

I have created a SettingsActivity for my app. In this Activity I am using the SharedPreferences class to do handle the user editable preferences.

While setting up the SharedPreferences, I have to load them in the onCreate of my main activity and then again in the SettingsActivity. The probably was that both calls to the getXXXX() methods require defaults and I figured that it would not be good to hard-code the default values into both places because I would imagine it would be problematic in the future if I ever changed them.

Which is the best/most popular (or accepted standard) of doing this?

• Create a global variables class in which I import into each activity and define my default constants in there?

• Use putExtra and getExtra to pass the data from the main activity to the settings activity?

Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

I think Squonk has a good answer, but if you’re looking for an alternative, consider creating a Settings class with all of your settings as members. It could have a static method like loadFromPreferences(Context) that would return a Settings object constructed from SharedPreferences, using whatever defaults you need. It could also have a saveSettings(Context) method to save your edits. Hope that helps.