In my current project, I have three different EditText widgets, in three different Activity layouts, which are used to input a year. I started by creating the UI and originally had
<EditText android:id="@+id/year_text" ... other attributes ... />
in each of my XML layout files. I never had any compiler errors due to this name clash and only realized that it might be a problem as I started to implement the behavior behind the UI for each Activity. So my first question is whether or not this kind of name clash will lead to problems down the road?
From what I understand, the + tells the layout parser to create a new value for the named ID in the R.java file. I can also reference a previously given ID using the @id/name syntax. What happens if I remove the + from all of my EditTexts but one? This solves the problem of allocating a new value for the identifier in the R class. But will reusing the same ID inside different layouts cause any problems? (Recall that the name clashes are across different XML layout files, not within the same layout.)
For now, I have created long names for all of my widget IDs. For example:
<EditText android:id="@+id/details_year_text" ... other attributes ... />
<EditText android:id="@+id/year_filter_year_text" ... other attributes ... />
<EditText android:id="@+id/year_and_number_filter_year_text" ... other attributes ... />
The prefix follows the name of the XML layout file where each EditText lives. This gets a little bit cumbersome, especially when using the autocomplete feature in NetBeans. (Yes, I’m using NetBeans rather than Eclipse. =p). If I do in fact need to use unique names for each of my EditText widgets, it would be handy to separate them into namespaces. Does the XML layout support any syntax which will create inner classes of R.id which can serve as namespaces for my IDs?
Finally, I know this is a very small project. I can imagine there are Android apps with a lot more widgets than I am using. What is the standard practice, if any, for naming and organizing IDs in the XML layouts of a project?
For your first question, android provides id tag for your resources xml file, which means you can declare your id first ( similar to string ), here is the information that might help you: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/more-resources.html#Id