Develop Reference

Android Button integer ID

I would like to have a function that if called can be passed the name of the button and then change the text of said button. I have attempted to use the function findViewById but it wont let me pass a string as it takes a int. This is my question, how can i store the integer value of the Button id's so i can pass to this function?

You could use tags if you need to deal with Strings. Set a tag on the Button using the android:tag xml attribute or setTag. Then you can use findViewWithTag to get a reference to the button.
But it'd probably be easier to just use IDs referenced from the resources object R: R.id.button

Get ResourceId for a programatically created control in Android

I have created controls in android pragmatically by reading an xml
For Example
CheckBox checkbox = new CheckBox(this);
checkbox.setText("Text");
I would like to get the values in the control at a later stage dynamically
View view = this.findViewById(resId);
bool checked = ((CheckBox)view).isChecked();
How do I "resId" for the control created pragmatically.
I tried to use checkbox.getId() but it is returning 0

You better keep reference to your control and use it to set values.
Map<String, CheckBox > checkBoxes = new HashMap<String, CheckBox >();
...
checkBoxes.put("checkBox1", new CheckBox(this));
...
CheckBox checkbox = checkBoxes.get("checkBox1");
But if you really want id you can set your custom id via setId method as #Merlevede suggested but let android generate the id to avoid conflicts. Create a xml resource item:
<item type="id" name="your_super_puper_id"/>
And then use it: xxx.setId(R.id.your_super_puper_id)
To find Views you can use tagging. Using setTag method you can attach any object to a view and then use that object to find view via findViewWithTag method.
String superPuperStringId = "checkBox1";
someView.setTag(superPuperStringId);
...
view = someViewGroup.findViewWithTag(superPuperStringId);
Also you can create your checkbox via xml and assign id there.

You can set a custom ID using checkbox.setID(25) (for example), you need to provide a unique ID. The problem that you may encounter is that there's and ID collision with some other control (if you're also using a layout XML), because the IDs are generated automatically.
I would suggest keeping your checkbox variable as a member of your class, so that yo can access it later on.

How can I add multiple tags for one view directly in XML?

As the question states I simply want to add more than one tag to an XML View. For example, say I want to set an array of strings AND a separate string from my resources. I know how to do them individually but I want to know if there's a way of attaching more than one tag to a view directly within the XML code.
Edit:
My plan was to have a LinearLayout (l#1) that contained a dynamic amount of of a different LinearLayout (l#2) and within that View there would be a Spinner and an EditText. I need one tag for the hint of the EditText and the other for the array of strings to populate the Spinner. In the entire layout there are a multiple l#1 each using l#2 to populate it dynamically and each needing different hints and string arrays based on what they are used for.
My next idea was to add a integer as a tag to represent l#1 and and use a Switch/Case block in my code to populate the children of l#2 with the right hints and string arrays.

I don't think this is possible in XML, but in code what you could do is create a custom object which holds the strings you require and set that as the tag.
class CustomTagObject {
public List<Strings> strings;
public String myString;
}
Then later
CustomTagObject tagObj = new CustomTagObject();
tagObj.strings = new ArrayList<Strings>("String 1", "String 2");
tagObj.myString = "String from resources";
view.setTag(tagObj);
If you explain why you want to hold these items as the tag, I may be able to help you find an alternative approach?

Above solution works, but the usage is wrong(it will add extra overhead on your end to manage the key/value map).
The better way to achieve above is to use an overloaded method of setTag which allows you to specify id associated with the value.
Method signature:
public void setTag(int key, Object tag)

MenuItem#getTag()

On subclasses of View there is a getTag() method, which returns the android:tag attribute's value from .xml.
I would like the same for a MenuItem... is it okay to just cast it to a View?
Because item elements also allow a tag attribute in .xml...
Update: My goal with this is setting a tag in .xml, i.e. "notranslate", and querying it at runtime (we localize by hand at runtime, don't ask...)

It is always alright to cast, however, casting any Interface cannot be checked at compile time, only runtime. This is normally the reason many do not recommend casting an Interface that you have no control over. Having the proper error checking code is the best way to insure that such a cast does not break your code.
For the casting, it doesn't really matter whether the MenuItem is an Interface or a View, but the object it references must be one of View's subclasses, if not a View itself. If you are going to cast it, try the cast and catch a ClassCastException just in case as this is the error that will be thrown in runtime.
Another option is that since the MenuItem is simply an interface, you can easily just create a View subclass that utilizes MenuItem allowing you to do the cast. If you are doing a custom ContextMenu as many launchers do, then chances are your answer is nearly complete.
Hope this helps,
FuzzicalLogic

MenuItem is an interface. Any class can implement this interface and so it will not always be safe to cast the MenuItem to a View. You can use the "instanceOf" operator to test to see if the object that implements the MenuItem interface is indeed a View or not.
I understand that you want to define a flag in the XML definition of the menu and then at run time interrogate that flag to make a programmatic decision.
The Menu Resource Documentation records what attributes can be set in the XML. You can consider using (abusing) one of those settings such as the "android:alphabeticShortcut" to encode the flag and use the MenuItem::getAlphabeticShortcut() method to get the value. This does not require casting - it just uses the existing fields in the MenuItem XML construct/class for your own purposes.
Perhaps a less hacky way to do this is to keep a simple table in a separate assets file that lists the menu item identifiers and the special behavior associated with that identifier such as to translate or not to translate.
Alternatively create a simple class that has a table with this configuration information hard coded using the logical "#[+][package:]id/resource_name" resource identifier as the keys to the table. While this doesn't keep it all in one place (in the XML) it does it in a manner that is not encoding information in unused attributes, or relying on the ids not changing. The "table" could be implemented as a static method with an embedded switch statement allowing code such as "if (TranslationTable.shouldTranslate(menuItem.getItemId())) { do translation }"

I had a similar problem in that I wanted to associate some arbitrary data with each menu item so that I could handle menu items in a generic way without having to use hardcoded checks for individual item ids in code.
What I did was for a particular menu item (e.g. #+id/foo) There was an a TypedArray that was defined using the same name as the menu item ID. You could do this with other types of resources as well.
So to do the association, you get the resouce entry name (foo in my example) and then use that to look up the id of the other resource of a different type (#array/foo in my example).
In my handler for menu I had code like this:
Resources resources = getResources();
String name = resources.getResourceEntryName(item.getItemId());
int id = resources.getIdentifier(name, "array", "com.example");
if(id != 0)
{
TypedArray data = resources.obtainTypedArray(id);
// Use the typed array to get associated data
}
EDIT:
Actually it is even easier than that. There is nothing special about the ids on menu items other than you don't want multiple menu items with the same id. The id does not have to be of the form #+id/foo. It can actually also refer to other resources. So in my example above, instead of having the menu have an id of #+id/foo and using the resource manager to use that to find #array/foo, I changed to actually have the menu item have the id of #array/foo.
Now in my onOptionsItemSelected I have this:
Resources resources = getResources();
if("array".equals(resources.getResourceTypeName(item.getItemId())))
{
TypedArray data = resources.obtainTypedArray(item.getItemId());
// Use the typed array
}

Android and storing/loading preferences for resources - how to achieve consistency?

I'm writing an application and need some help with consistently storing and loading preferences related to certain resources. Let me give an example.
Suppose I have 10 spinners. They all have the same functionality but different meaning. Because they have the same functionality, I can bind them to the same onItemSelectedListener, which will then deal with the selected value.
Well, what if I also want to store the preferences for each spinner? For example, when a spinner value is selected, I'd store a key "spinner SOMETHING" = SOME_DATA.
The problem is - what should this SOMETHING be? The listener has the following signature:
public void onItemSelected(AdapterView parent, View v, int position, long id)
The position and id are not helpful here as they're set relative to each spinner.
However, the parent, which in this case is the spinner itself, should have all the information I need. I tried using parent.getId() to get a resource ID of each spinner and store the preference using a key "spinner ID" but apparently these resource IDs change when you add more resources into your app, so my settings would get reset because the keys change.
What should I do here? I can't seem to find a simple parent.getName() function of some sort that would return me a consistent name of each spinner.
Thank you.

The getId is the only thing I know of that has a unique reference to the View, but as you say, a view might not have the same Id in the next build of your app.
The best human-readable identifier available out of the box would be getPrompt, which would simply show you whatever you have set as the spinners prompt. It should be an OK identifier, but it is of course also prone to breakage if you manually change your prompt texts.
The most break-proof way, then, is to specify an identifier in the general container - tag - that every View contains.
String myIdentifier = (String) parent.getTag();
If you're already using the tag for something else, the 1.6+ APIs include the ability to specify several tags, and access them via index. If you need to support older API versions, you could always set the tag to a wrapper object that contains both the identifier, and your original tag.