If, like me, you are old and have been developing for Android for a while, you should, like me, appreciate the fact that the backwards compatibility of the OS has come a long way. Sure, they may toy with my feelings from time to time, but we all need a little excitement every now and then.
I have recently decided that I will invest more time into learning how all the tools at an Android developer’s disposal can make me code better, faster, cleaner, and less buggy (I initially said “buggier” because I want to rhyme but someone who supposedly does English better complained).
To start with, I have been trying recently to consistently use the Resource Type annotations. These annotations prevent code like this from exploding:
private void setThingsToTextView(int res1, int res2, int res3, int res4) {
// do stuff
}
This will explode because:
- Fields are named horrendously
- Without reading what the method does, it is so easy to pass the wrong resource ID (I can only assume that it wants resource IDs)
Resource annotations help with reason #2 by letting you and the compiler know just what type of resource is expected. There are a lot of available annotations (Read the docs!) but I find that the things I use the most are, well, the things I use the most:
@StringRes - expects an R.string.*
@DrawableRes - expects an R.drawable.*
@IdRes - expects an R.id.*
@ColorRes - expects an R.color.*
I have updated my SDK Sandbox project with an Activity to illustrate use of these annotations. FAIR WARNING: IT USES ENUMS. If this annoys you, DO NOT click through.
So how do we stop the method above from exploding? Let’s fix all the things!
private void setThingsToTextView(@IdRes int textView, @StringRes int introText, @DrawableRes int heroImage, @ColorRes int backgroundColour) {
// do stuff<
}
Ahhh. Easy. And so much better.