I've been using repo for quiet a long time now but never bothered to know what <remove-project> in manifest.xml does.
What does <remove-project> do — it doesn't download the project at all or it downloads it but removes it from codebase later?
It's here somewhere but I'm pretty bad at reading python.
https://gerrit.googlesource.com/git-repo/+/master/docs/manifest-format.md#Element-remove_project
Element remove-project
Deletes the named project from the internal manifest table, possibly allowing a subsequent project element in the same manifest file to replace the project with a different source.
This element is mostly useful in a local manifest file, where the user can remove a project, and possibly replace it with their own definition.
Related
For a mistake i've overwritten my two project that has same names from android studio and i've dismissed that action today i've tryed to open the main project and i've found no Java classes in it and just the layout's files.
While in the second project to which i was overwritting there is a huge confusion of files and trying to recover the project version by using history of Android Studio even those files has disappeared.
Is it possible in anyway to recover the whole project?
Ps: all that remain from that project is a generated apk.
I have some solutions that may work.
Candidates are:
Search for $AppData$ folders
Search for registries
(Hardest) you may have to preserve the disk state and carve the files yourself..
Cheers, and hope it helped..!
To use the third method(file carving), you may not cause many file operations occur!!(The system may overwrite the previous data)
Hopefully you used source control such as git or svn and it is a simple matter of reverting to the last commit you made, however that is done in your chosen source control. If you don't use source control, perhaps this will serve as a lesson to do so in the future.
I've not used Android Studio, but as a JetBrains product like IntelliJ, it will have a local history record of changes. But that would only record very recent changes.
If that doesn't work, you may have to find out if your chosen operating system backed up the files in a restore point etc.
If you have turned on the file history, you can use that to go to a previous version of the folder. Can also use system restore to go back to a previous date. Can also use third party softwares such as Recuva to get deleted files back.
Make sure to keep a copy of current state somewhere before trying these out.
Is it possible to specify some information, such as API keys, in a file, and then somehow inject this information into the AndroidManifest file (maybe during the build process)?
For my particular use case, the documentation for react-native-maps requires adding a Google Maps API key to the AndroidManifest file. However, I'd like to keep sensitive information out of the AndroidManifest file (instead, inside a file that will eventually be gitignored for example).
On a side note, from this question, it seems that all information inside the AndroidManifest is available to all packages on the same device. Is this still true?
If the information is only needed in the manifest, you can define manifest placeholders in your build.gradle file and reference them using ${} macro syntax in the manifest.
If the information might be needed elsewhere, consider using string resources created via resConfig in your build.gradle file.
The build.gradle file can pull the actual values from gradle.properties, a custom properties file, via some API call to a server, or whatever else you want, given sufficient Gradle/Groovy/Java coding. Typically, I have gradle.properties listed in .gitignore, and so I put this sort of thing in there, though I am not certain if that approach is common practice.
it seems that all information inside the AndroidManifest is available to all packages on the same device. Is this still true?
"All" is a strong term, but I would say that the vast majority of information in the manifest is visible through PackageManager. Sometimes, it's not directly accessible (e.g., I don't recall a way to get the <intent-filter> list for a component), but it's still there if you find the right way to get at it.
When you are working with AOSP repo you can create a local manifest folder and store your own manifest files for your own projects. As our project grows though we continue to add more projects to our manifest. We track this manifest file on git so we can all stay current.
The problem is that when you call repo sync you have to pull all the changes to your local manifest file first. If you don't you may miss out on required projects someone else has added. Well, repo is capable of syncing it's own manifest file and does so automatically when you call repo sync. Is there a way to have our own manifest file also get updated automatically at the same time before the actual sync occurs? I'd rather not use some extra script to do it, it would be really awesome if repo could handle this on it's own and I feel like it should be able to.
This sounds like a reasonable request. You might want to post it to the repo-discuss mailing list to get some traction (or get an explanation why it's a bad idea).
From my point of view, the point of local manifests is that they're... local. If you want to persist changes and share between different users via Git, why not modify the original manifest file (typically default.xml)? You've branched the manifest git anyway, and adding a separate section with your gits shouldn't cause much grief when merging.
I have a small Android application that uses different sets of files (a couple of images, a small SQLite DB and a couple of XML files) depending on the specific task at hand.
I know I can include my files into the main application APK using resources or assets but I would be happy to distribute them in a separated APK.
How can I create a data-only APK file?
How can I distribute it? In particular, do I have to do anything special for a data-only package (for example for associating it to the main application package in some way)?
(I'm intentioned to give the user a link to the data package and ask him to install it. No automatic installation required.)
How can I install my files into the internal or into the external storage area of my application? Is it possible at all to install files into the internal storage area created by the main application installer? Do I have to set any particular permission for this?
My approach to this would be to create a wrapper app that's nothing but a content-provider and serves up the files per request by your main app. This would allow you to supply different data packages for the user -- you could even have your main app select between those relatively easily.
It looks like that the commonly accepted way to have the same application with different contents (or styles, or configurations) is to use an Android Library Project for the common code (that is: the whole application, the "engine", the "app framework") and a standard Android Application Project for the contents (that is: an application that actually contains just data). A little bit confusing, just because the "library" here is actually the whole "app", but this seems to be the way to go.
More in detail:
Create an Android Library Application and put into it as much code as you can (all of the non-changing stuff). Please note that this library cannot be launched and cannot be distributed alone. It must be included in a hosting application.
Create a standard Android Application. Include your library into this project. Put in /res and in /asset all of your data (files, XML, etc.).
Compile everything and distribute.
Repeat this cycle every time you need a different version. Different because of data, style, configuration or anything else. Publish the resulting app with a new name.
For what regards me, I'm not completely satisfied by this approach.
A possible alternative is preprocessing the source code with Ruby, Python, Perl, GIT, bash, Ant, Maven, Rake or any other tool that is able to read a file from here, make some change here and there, and write the file there.
The general outline is something like this:
Make a "template" application. Leave your /res and /assset empty.
Run a custom-made script. The script reads a configuration file, copy the /res and /asset files from your repository into the project /res and /asset directories, changes some Java source file and creates/changes some XML file.
Compile and distribute (with a new name, of course).
Using GIT or other SCMs, you just make a new branch for every new version and compile it. Not very elegant (because it can strongly interfere with the normal use of the SCM) but...
There are a few example of these approaches on the web. I'm not completely satisfied by them, either.
Frankly, what the Android ecosystem should offer to solve this problem is some kind of "in-app package manager". Something like the Eclipse Update Manager. This would allow us to use the same application framework to handle different scenarios.
As an alternative, a solid, officially-supported, template-based code-generation mechanism would be nice. Something in the spirit of "Software Production Line": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_production_line . Have a look at fw4spl, for example: http://code.google.com/p/fw4spl/ .
I am developing Android application for which I want to ship several different apks for different languages in the market (every language includes a huge bundle of files and I want to avoid creating one huge apk with all language bundles).
So what I need is to customize a bit the Manifest file for each language: e.g. the package of the application and possibly the application version etc. I know how I can template the manifest so that I can manually insert my values in certain points in the file (see this post). The problem is that I use ant for preparing my production apks, but otherwise I develop using Eclipse and so I need my project working in the IDE too. Eclipse requires complete Manifest file and will not understand of the templating I will use for the ant builds as far as I know (please somebody prove me wrong).
My problem is that I want to avoid maintaining two manifest files that are identical in large part (one templated and one complete for Eclipse). Currently I can think of two possible approaches, but I do not know how to accomplish them:
Use some kind of definition injection in the manifest file: if I am able to inject certain xml file in the body of AndroidManifest file, I can keep the identical part in one xml part and customize only the points of difference
If it is possible to configure Eclipse to use some sequence of ant tasks to build Android projects instead of the prebuild routines I might be able to integrate the way I build my production apks in the IDE.
Please if there is anyone who knows how to accomplish any of the above two, or has any other idea how can I solve my issue: help!
Take a look on ant replace task:
<replace file="${build.out}/src/config.prop" token="###" value="${build.version}-${build.type}"/>
But again you should be careful with values that they are unique.
You could also replace your eclipse manifest with generated manifest by echoxml task.
Or you could reuse this nice task about xml manipulation.
At the company I work for, we pretty much use the approach given by Eugen to automate the build process of apps that e.g. should simply be branded differently by exchanging certain assets, styles, strings and configurations. We tend to set up the project and build process as follows:
Create the Android project and set it up such that it works for a specific branding. This will make sure that you can still build and run from Eclipse. Assuming that the codebase does not change between differently branded releases, that should be fine.
Create an ant build configuration that:
copies any files that are going to be changed to a backup directory
modifies the project files according to a configuration file (see below)
compiles the project sources and signs it with a release key (if making a release build)
copies back the files from step 1, overwriting any changes and returning the project to its original state
Create configuration files for every 'branding', or language specific release in your scenario.
Basically these steps will allow you to create branded/partner/language specific builds by simply providing the appropriate configuration with the ant build command. In our case it looks somewhat like this:
ant partner-release -Dpartner=stackoverflow
where 'stackoverflow' will point to a configuration with the same name. In our case these configuration files are small xml files that contain all the parameters that are to be replaced for that specific build. It could contain strings, but might as well point to other files (e.g. logo images) that should be copied into the assets/resources. For example:
<config>
<version_name>1.00</version_name>
<version_code>1</version_code>
...
</config>
Some more pointers:
We use xmltask to modify any xml files in the project; e.g. the manifest and resources.
Since the aforementioned task is really easy to use, our build configuration files are also set up as xml files, as illustrated above. It's quite human readable and easy and straightforward to change.
You can also use replace and ReplaceRegExp tasks to change configuration-dependent variables in almost any file. The latter can be especially convenient to make build-time changes to source code.