Android, getting resource ID from string?

I need to pass a resource ID to a method in one of my classes. It needs to use both the id that the reference points to and also it needs the string. How should I best achieve this?

For example:

R.drawable.icon

I need to get the integer ID of this, but I also need access to the string "icon".

It would be preferable if all I had to pass to the method is the "icon" string.

Solution 1:

@EboMike: I didn't know that Resources.getIdentifier() existed.

In my projects I used the following code to do that:

public static int getResId(String resName, Class<?> c) {

    try {
        Field idField = c.getDeclaredField(resName);
        return idField.getInt(idField);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return -1;
    } 
}

It would be used like this for getting the value of R.drawable.icon resource integer value

int resID = getResId("icon", R.drawable.class); // or other resource class

I just found a blog post saying that Resources.getIdentifier() is slower than using reflection like I did. Check it out.

Solution 2:

You can use this function to get resource ID.

public static int getResourceId(String pVariableName, String pResourcename, String pPackageName) 
{
    try {
        return getResources().getIdentifier(pVariableName, pResourcename, pPackageName);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return -1;
    } 
}

So if you want to get for drawable call function like this

getResourceId("myIcon", "drawable", getPackageName());

and for string you can call it like this

getResourceId("myAppName", "string", getPackageName());

Read this

Solution 3:

This is based on @Macarse answer.

Use this to get the resources Id in a more faster and code friendly way.

public static int getId(String resourceName, Class<?> c) {
    try {
        Field idField = c.getDeclaredField(resourceName);
        return idField.getInt(idField);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("No resource ID found for: "
                + resourceName + " / " + c, e);
    }
}

Example:

getId("icon", R.drawable.class);

Solution 4:

How to get an application resource id from the resource name is quite a common and well answered question.

How to get a native Android resource id from the resource name is less well answered. Here's my solution to get an Android drawable resource by resource name:

public static Drawable getAndroidDrawable(String pDrawableName){
    int resourceId=Resources.getSystem().getIdentifier(pDrawableName, "drawable", "android");
    if(resourceId==0){
        return null;
    } else {
        return Resources.getSystem().getDrawable(resourceId);
    }
}

The method can be modified to access other types of resources.

Solution 5:

If you need to pair a string and an int, then how about a Map?

static Map<String, Integer> icons = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

static {
    icons.add("icon1", R.drawable.icon);
    icons.add("icon2", R.drawable.othericon);
    icons.add("someicon", R.drawable.whatever);
}