Develop Reference

How does the apt-plugin work?

So,
We are using Dagger 2 in our Android application.
Code generated by
Dagger 2 is located in build/generated/source/apt.
In the documentation of apt-plugin it states that :"Using this plugin Android Studio will be configured to place the generated sources on the build path, preventing errors in the IDE"
If I remove apt-plugin from my build.gradle file, in a place where I use generated code I see compilation error. (Which is reasonable, generated code is not my source).
The questions are:
What does it mean that apt-plugin configures Android Studio so that it places generated code to build path ?
From what I know final dex file is generated from source folder that is specified in build.gradle, how do these generated files become the source ?
Thanks.

The apt-plguin is a gradle plugin and as such it runs with your build script.
This plugin configures apt to be run with your build and sources to be generated. It further adds the path of the generated files to your source sets, which is why the build succeeds and Android Studio recognizes the files as well.
For further information you could always have a look on the gradle documentation on Gradle Plugins.

Can an Android Library Project (APKLIB) be obfuscated by Proguard?

I am attempting to obfuscate an Android Library Project (APKLIB), allowing the library to distributed to potential clients for test development without compromising the majority of the source code.
Unfortunately, there is no documentation and no examples that Google can provide, and the only references to obfuscated APKLIBs are question posts with no solutions.
I have attempted to use the android-maven-plugin as well as the maven-proguard-plugin with Maven to obfuscate the APKLIB, but the end result is not obfuscated. I also tried moving the proguard goal to the process-classes and prepare-package phases of maven with no success.
My last resort is splitting the source code out of the APKLIB and obfuscating it as a JAR, while leaving the APKLIB as AIDL files and resources with a dependency on the obfuscated JAR. However, I would like to avoid this if possible since our project has a large number of libraries already.
Does anyone know if it is even possible to obfuscate an APKLIB? And if so, how?

Hi are you asking about creating a obfuscated jar file?
You can do that by adding build.xml file to it and making changes in your proguard-project.txt file and running "ant release" from command line and you will find the obfuscated.jar under a proguard folder in your bin folder of project.
Steps;
-> To add build.xml in your project in linux open a terminal and go to android/tools/ant folder and run ./android update project -p /path of your android library project. And you will find build.xml in your project root directory.
-> To enable Obfuscation in your project in your editor open a project.properties file and remove comment from proguard.config=${sdk.dir}/tools/proguard/proguard-android.txt:proguard-project.txt
-> Add your changes to proguard-project.txt file and in terminal go to your project and run ant release

Eclipse: Override library path defined in project.properties

I'm using ActionBarSherlock as a library. We haven't included ABS into our repository so everyone participating our project must download and install it separately. ActioBarSherlock is an Android library project and I have got it running by opening it and my project in the same Eclipse's workspace (neither of those are copied into workspace, they both exists in another folder) and adding it into my project.properties by following this:
Referencing a library project.
That reference path is relative and since everyone might have ABS in different folder, we also have different paths in Eclipse's project.properties file as android.library.reference.1. Is there any way locally override that library path so that we can have project.properties in our repo but Eclipse will use locally some other path? Currently I have to manually fix that path after every time I pull from our repo because of different paths.
There exists other *.properties files but Eclipse ignores them:
local.properties
Customizable computer-specific properties for the build system. If you use Ant to build the project, this contains the path to the SDK installation. Because the content of the file is specific to the local installation of the SDK, the local.properties should not be maintained in a source revision control system. If you use Eclipse, this file is not used.
ant.properties
Customizable properties for the build system. You can edit this file to override default build settings used by Ant and also provide the location of your keystore and key alias so that the build tools can sign your application when building in release mode. This file is integral to the project, so maintain it in a source revision control system. If you use Eclipse, this file is not used.

Just have each person put it in projectroot/libs. The newer (ADT 17 and above, IIRC) versions of the ADT will automatically pick it up and compile it into your app. Note that the folder is libs, with an s, and not lib. Using /lib won't work.

Options:
project.properties: You could create a link in every users home folder, libs and have the path in the project.properties refer to ~/libs
Using a common library:
Create a library project called "common". In settings, have it export the jar. In your Android application, import the jar.
Personally I think configuring with maven would be best but the 2nd option was quickest.

What about if you ignore the project.properties in your repo? That way each user can keep their own and you won't need to override it all the time. I don't think you can override that locally.
Another option to simplify things is you can export the project as a JAR file instead of referencing it as a library project. If you don't need to modify ABS code you can right click the project -> java -> jar file and all the developers can keep that in the same place for the sake of simplicity.

Edit: This question is no longer needed for our project since we moved from Eclipse to Android Studio and Gradle build system. Eclipse with Maven should have worked too, as #bgs suggested.
Our previous approach:
Still looking for better alternative but so far we ended up keeping project.properties in our repo. project.properties does not get overridden if there is no changes to it when pulling. We also suggest in our README that users add this
[alias]
commit = commit -X project.properties
to their .hg/hgrc configuration file to prevent accidentally commiting changes of that file.
This method has at least one drawback: When merging, you might get error like this abort: cannot partially commit a merge (do not specify files or patterns) even when you commit your merge with hg commit -m 'merge'. If this happens, disable that alias temporarily.

Building and including an external module in an Android app

I would like to include this plist parser module in my Android application, ideally without just copying the entire module source into my source tree (if that would even work).
I have successfully added the module as a project into Eclipse (3.7.0) and resolved errors by fixing the build path to include Android 2.1, which is what I am using. However, now I'm stuck. All of the information on using external libraries with your Android project I can find expect you to have a JAR of the library, but I only have this source code. I can run the plist parser module as an Android application, which appears to compile an .apk, but that doesn't actually do anything because it's not a standalone application. Any options to just build the module without running it are greyed out in the Eclipse interface.
How can I either build this module into a .jar for inclusion, or include it in some other way?
Edit: In order to clear the errors in the module after I added it to Eclipse, I followed the instructions in this answer.

You can either convert the whole thing to a library project or simply include the source code in your app's project. To create a library project, you can import the project from github, and after you get it compile, remove any activities, go to the project's Properties->Android and check the 'Is a library' check box. Then add it as a dependency to your own project.

How to include JAR in APK without Eclipse?

I maintain an Android app and am not using Eclipse. I am not using Eclipse. I am using ant and build.xml and build.properties.
I have places my .jar file into the libs/ directory. My code compiles just dandy. But when I run it on the emulator, the output APK does not include the .jar, so I get a runtime stacktrace:
ERROR/AndroidRuntime(470): java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.google.ads.AdView
my build.properties looks like this:
jar.libs.dir=libs
And the libs/ directory contains my .jar file.
What needs to be in build.xml so that the external .jar file is included in the APK?
Edit: In theory this answer should work, but it doesn't for me. Is it out of date? What gives? How to add external jar libraries to an android project from the command line

I just came over a similar problem and noticed that libraries should not be placed in "myprojectdir\lib". When I moved them to "myprojectdir\libs" everything started to work.

It turns out that I needed to upgrade the version of ant I was using to 1.8. During the compile process, I had been getting this error message:
Warning: Reference out.dex.jar.input.ref has not been set at runtime,
but was found duringbuild file parsing, attempting to resolve. Future
versions of Ant may support referencing ids defined in non-executed
targets.
I googled it, and found that I needed to upgrade Ant, and now I don't get this warning, and my application does not force close.

What needs to be in build.xml so that the external .jar file is included in the APK?
Just putting it in libs/ is sufficient.
my build.properties looks like this:
That line should not be necessary. It does not appear in my build.properties files that build successfully with JAR files.
If you use dexdump -f classes.dex from your project's bin/ directory, you will be able to determine whether com.google.ads.AdView made it in there. If it did not, then something is strange with your build scripts. If it did, then perhaps there is a dependent JAR that you are missing (though I would expect a VerifyError in that case).

You use 3rd party library, but you seem didn't run DX on it. Make sure that not only your code processed by DX tool (I assume Ant does it), but also all 3rd party libraries you use. You can look in 7Bee script I use to convert web applications to Android davlik format, so it can work for you too. You can find more about the script on Atjeews page.

Solution:
right click on the project in project tree and select Project
properties
select Java Build Path
select TAB Order
and Export
check GoogleAdMobAdsSdk-4.0.4.jar (or your
version SDK)
press OK
clean project by menu Project
-> Clean
rebuild project (Project – Build Automatically)