Question

I have String arrays to use for Spinner or such.

<string-array name="Animal">
    <item >Cat</item>
    <item >Dog</item>
    <item >Rabbit</item>
    <item >Bird</item>
</string-array>

I have a container class to contain values users input or select from Spinner. The member variables are mostly primitives or Enum.

public class Container {
    protected int index;
    protected int age;
    protected String name;
    protected Animal pet;
}

This is how one of the Enum classes are defined (Note this is a simpler version, and in my actual code, there are some more methods or variables, and each Enum instance is upper case, like CAT).

public enum Animal {
    Cat, Dog, Rabbit, Bird,     
}

As you see, I’m virtually repeating the same thing in Enum and XML. That isn’t really good according to DRY. Which should I remove, and how should?

At this point, I lean toward keeping Enum, since it’s functionally more versatile than XML, and no less maintainable. The only possible problem I might be concerned about is its performance. They might require more memory, and some extra coding work.

Answer 1

If you want to avoid duplication, you should keep the Enum, and then you populate programmaticaly the spinner using for(Animal animal:Animal.values()) {...}.

You may use the Enum name as a key to retrieve a localized label or things like that.