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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T17:09:33+00:00

I’m new to Android development, and I’ve been playing around with it a bit.

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I’m new to Android development, and I’ve been playing around with it a bit. I was trying to create a program that has a small database-like collection of never-changing data. In C#, my currently best language, I’d use a List of a custom class and serialize that to an xml file, then read that into my application at runtime. I found the /xml resource folder in Android, but I’m not sure how I would go about doing what I’m envisioning. What would be the best way to go about doing this?

The data will never need to change. Example:

Blob   | A  | B
----------------
Blob 1 | 23 | 42
Blob 2 | 34 | 21

I know that’s laid out like a table, but using a database doesn’t really make sense to me because the data will never change, and I would need a way to store it to initially populate the database anyway.

So basically I’m looking for a way to store somewhat-complex static data in my application. Any ideas?

EDIT: I also saw the /raw folder. So I could store things in /res/raw or /res/xml. But I’m not sure what would be the best way to store/parse the data…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The best way is to use the Android Resource Heirarchy.

    In the res/values/ directory, you can store any number of key-value pairs for several basic data types. In your app, you would refer to them using an autogenerated resource id (name based on your resource’s key). See the link above for more documentation and details.

    Android also supports raw datafiles. You could store your data in the file directory under res/raw/yourfile.dat

    You you create your data in whatever text based format you want and then read it on activity startup using the resource access apis.

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