how to access the drawable resources by name in android

In my application, I need to get the some bitmap drawables somewhere where I do not want to keep the reference R. So I create a class DrawableManager to manage the drawables.

public class DrawableManager {
    private static Context context = null;

    public static void init(Context c) {
        context = c;
    }

    public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {
        return R.drawable.?
    }
}

Then I want to get the drawable by name somewhere like this( the car.png is put inside the res/drawables):

Drawable d= DrawableManager.getDrawable("car.png");

However as you can see, I can not access the resources by the name:

public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {
    return R.drawable.?
}

Any alternatives?

Note that your approach is almost always the wrong way to do things (better to pass the context into the object itself that is using the drawable than keeping a static Context somewhere).

Given that, if you want to do dynamic drawable loading, you can use getIdentifier:

Resources resources = context.getResources();
final int resourceId = resources.getIdentifier(name, "drawable", 
   context.getPackageName());
return resources.getDrawable(resourceId);

You could do something like this.-

public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {
    Context context = YourApplication.getContext();
    int resourceId = context.getResources().getIdentifier(name, "drawable", YourApplication.getContext().getPackageName());
    return context.getResources().getDrawable(resourceId);
}

In order to access the context from anywhere, you may extend Application class.-

public class YourApplication extends Application {

    private static YourApplication instance;

    public YourApplication() {
        instance = this;
    }

    public static Context getContext() {
        return instance;
    }
}

And map it in your Manifest application tag

<application
    android:name=".YourApplication"
    ....

Modify image content:

    ImageView image = (ImageView)view.findViewById(R.id.imagenElement);
    int resourceImage = activity.getResources().getIdentifier(element.getImageName(), "drawable", activity.getPackageName());
    image.setImageResource(resourceImage);

Using Kotlin

fun Context.getResource(name:String): Drawable? {
    val resID = this.resources.getIdentifier(name , "drawable", this.packageName)
    return ActivityCompat.getDrawable(this,resID)
}

I wrote it as Extension function so It can be used at any place in code.

Note: context.getResources().getDrawable(resourceId); is deprecated in Java.

Note: name of file,is name without extensions for ex "a.png" name will be "a".

You can achieve like this

int resourceId = getResources().getIdentifier("your_drawable_name", "drawable", getPackageName());

Set resourceId In Imageview

imageView.setImageResource(resourceId);