How can I instruct Eclipse to copy a file from my Android solution to an emulator, as part of Run/Debug? I have a small database, stored in Assets, that needs to accompany the application. Thus far I have simply copied the file myself using DDMS but would prefer to have it automatically included. The project properties allow me to specify some aspects of the build, e.g. the build order and which libraries should be included, but I don't see anything about simply copying a file.
Is the file in your "res/assets" folder not available using the AssetManager class during testing versus during testing or when installed via a signed apk?
I use a large file that I store in "res/raw" in one of my games, I am able to access this file during testing with eclipse without a problem just using the normal calls to context.getResources().openRawResource()
Deploying databases with your application it a reoccurring topic over in the android-developers Google group here is a post with a few thoughts on the matter.
Good luck.
Related
I am trying to package /somewhere/lib/python3.x inside APK's lib folder like jniLibs. But it contains *.py, *.pyc and other files. I have asked another question, but there is no answer. So this is a general question: do you ever used or developed any plugins that embed non-standard files in APK instead of using assets?
How would you access those files? I mean you could put them in the apk, an apk is just a zip file. But the system won't unpack them for you, and at runtime you won't be able to access the apk file itself (installation unzips your file and deletes the apk). You might be able to fool it into doing so by putting it with the jni libs and hoping it doesn't look at extention, but it seem like a bad idea.
However its not uncommon for an app to take its assets and write them to the filesystem on first boot. In fact its fairly common to do this with updatable assets (you'd then just download new versions on top of them, but you can use the old versions to not need an immediate network connection). This would probably work for you. Just make your initial activity a splash screen, and have it do the copy from assets to files in the background while the splash is up.
Hi i am looking into an android development , as we all know when we build the project it makes an APK that is the whole program. but is it possible to make a an android project / APK that would be able to use external files to include more info into the project.
like say for example i have a list commands or functions in my list , but i dont want it to be added into my APK build , is it possible to use it externally?
i was curious because something like COC and other games after downloading it , then downloads extra data from the net , more into updates for the whole game.
how is this possible or is it possible to do , and use functions or source codes externally and not include it into the APK , and also the proper usage of it
Any Android App can connect to the Internet and save downloaded data files to use as they need, without requiring to include them inside the APK. Indeed, for many games (and other Apps having large data sets), it's a sensible option.
There are a couple of things to be aware of:
Android restricts where (on the filesystem) you can save files. And no matter where you save the files, the user can delete them at any
time. Your App should be able to cope with this.
The files should only ever be data files - not executable code. Attempting to
execute downloaded files is likely to put your users at risk
(depending on the permissions your App was installed with) and is also likely to get your App marked as malware.
You should read the Android documentation on Data Storage to learn a bit more about it.
I was looking for a way to add some such folder in my Android Project that do no get compiled up to my apk file.
Why I need it :-
We need to maintain proper documentation for project (that actually
everybody needs to ;) nothing new),
but I find it very irritating to look out for that documentation
folder again and again.
.
I am open for any way i can make dcocumentain folder easily one
click accessible (I am already doing it thru taskbar sortcut. ) But
I want it to get the ease of version control thru Eclipse likewise we
do it for our project
IDE :- Eclipse
I got a way myself :-
I had an idea that if I create a folder in my application project with
some anonymous name that actually android has not listed in its
directories ("I am talking about the default one like "res", "src",
"anim"......)
Then either it should "raise an error" or should "ignore" it while compiling to form apk file
luckily it ignores any such folder. now i can put all the documentation in my project.
NOTE:-
My answer empirically driven
I had tested it by creating a "Docs" folder and then copied 1 GB of
random data (includes almost all type of files we came across from
multimedia to zipped ones).
Then I build the apk and the size of the apk was in-effective of all
this..
but when i copied the same data to assets it was showing a huge change
in size of my apk file..
Consider using Javadoc in addition or, if possible, instead of any other documentation.
I'm looking to packing a large sqlite database with an android app, about 200-300MB. From what I've read, my options are putting it in the assets folder, and coping it out at runtime, resulting in duplicate data, or downloading the database from the web at runtime. I don't want to create a webserver for this app, so I was thinking of creating a seperate app that just installs the database to get around the data duplication problem.
All of those are pretty crummy, and I was wondering if there is a better solution?
First, I don't think you are allowed to put a 200-300MB database in your assets folder and distribute it as a single apk, since the hard limit for an apk file size is (as per google's documentation) 50 MB and I doubt that your db will compress that far.. Google introduced the "APK expansion files" for packaging large files with your apk. You can read all about those here: http://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion-files.html
I think (but I have no experience with expansion files myself) that this will not fix the issue you mentioned about having to deal with duplicate data because of the requirement to copy out your database file, but at least this will help you in the sense that you won't have to host your database file on your own webserver. I quickly scanned the documentation on the link I gave above and it clearly states that you should NOT throw away the expansion files when you are done with them, so no help on that part.
Of course, for the "setting up your own webserver part": I wouldn't even bother setting up my own webserver. There are plenty of parties out there that provide you some file hosting service. Probably you will have to pay for the bandwidth, but hey.. if people download your db file a lot, that also means that your app is doing well ;-)
I test of apk expansion files. I created a test app with a 100 MB sqlite database, uploaded the apk and database to the play store. I then downloaded the app onto the phone, the database was downloaded at the same time. The database was automatically renamed and placed in the publicly accessible directory:
/storage/sdcard0/Android/obb/com.example.app/main.1.com.example.app.obb
The app was able to open the database without any problems, but required external read and write permissions. The new and original database are bit for bit, the same. This appears to be the best solution for my use case.
A few issues, the new android developer console does not support uploading expansion files, so the old one needs to be used. Google only allows 2 expansion files, so that may be an issue for some use cases. Google say that you must not rename or delete the file, and that your app must be able to download the file from Google itself if it wasn't automatically installed.
I'm programming an application in android which uses OCR. I'm using the tesseract ocr and I want to ask where should I put the language files in my project, so that when I install my app in my phone(Samsung Galaxy S) the files be somewhere for the app to use them for the ocr process. I think that it should be in a place like: /mnt/sdcard/tesseract/tessdata, but how this can be done without putting them myself in my device and let the installation to do this.
You'll have to include the files with your project in the assets folder.
See AssetManager to learn how to access your files from your activity. Also I would suggest that you don't copy them to the SDCard. Unfortunately since your files are going to have to be included with your project, and thus will be present in your apk file you're going to end up with a larger application size. But also unfortunately I don't believe that there is a way to delete the files from your apk at runtime, so even if you copy them over to the SD your app is still going to be the same size. For that reason I see no reason to copy them to the SD card, just access them from the AssetManager when you need to get them. Doing it that way also means that your application will not break if the SD card is removed / unmounted.
Simply put them under Assets in a "tessdata" folder. That is in your project.
You can use Xamarin and the Tesseract for Xamarin nuget package, they're really easy to use, just bear in mind that you probably will have to install older version of the nugget if the latest version doesn't work. (2.10 was the working one as far as i remember)