Assets

Let's have something lighter than the application separation stuff was in the previous entry.

I got a mail from someone who wanted to embed raw files into the APK file so that they are available for the application when it is executing. I have never done such a thing but I remembered faintly something about the res/raw directory where such resources reside. They are still there but now there is a better thing: assets. The difference between a raw resource in res/raw directory and an asset is that assets behave like a file system, they can be listed, iterated over, discovered, just like files while for raw resources, you need the resource ID.

Click here to download the example program.

This simple application iterates over the files in the asset directory, reads their contents and sets three TextFields according to the content of these files. Assets go into the ./assets directory in the project root and can contain any files. The AssetManager class provides access to assets as InputStreams.

Posted in: assets,resources