Can the Android drawable directory contain subdirectories

Question

In the Android SDK documentation  all of the examples used with the  drawable my image xml syntax directly address images that are stored in the res drawable directory in my project   I am wondering if it is explicitly not okay to create a sub directory within the drawable directory   For example  if I had the following directory layout   res drawable -- sandwiches   -- tunaOnRye png   -- hamAndSwiss png -- drinks   -- coldOne png   -- hotTea png   Could I reference the image of a tuna salad sandwich as  drawable sandwiches tunaOnRye  Or do I have to keep the hierarchy flat in the drawable directory

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Check Bash Flatten Folder script that converts folder hierarchy to a single folder

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In android studio with gradle you can have multiple source directors which will allow you to separate resources  For example   android                android sourceSets           main res srcDirs     src main extraresdirnamed sandwiches    src main res                      However the names must not collide which means you will still need to have names such as sandwiches tunaOnRye but you will be able to have a seperate section for all of your sandwiches    This allows you to store your resources in different structures  useful for auto generated content such as actionbargenerator

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It is possible to have multiple drawable folders by having an extra folder parallel to  res  with a subdirectory  drawable  and then add following to gradle  sourceSets       main           res srcDirs  src main  lt extra res gt            Tested with gradle 6 5 1

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Yes - it does suck    However you can use the assets folder and have sub directories in there and load images that way

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With the advent of library system  creating a library per big set of assets could be a solution   It is still problematic as one must avoid using the same names within all the assets but using a prefix scheme per library should help with that   It s not as simple as being able to create folders but that helps keeping things sane

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assets      You can use it to store raw asset files  Files that you save here are compiled into an  apk file as-is  and the original filename is preserved  You can navigate this directory in the same way as a typical file system using URIs and read files as a stream of bytes using the AssetManager  For example  this is a good location for textures and game data  http   developer android com tools projects index html

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This is not perfect methods  You have to implement same way which is display here    You can also call the image under the folder through the code you can use  Resources res   getResources    Drawable shape   res  getDrawable R drawable gradient box    TextView tv    TextView findViewByID R id textview   tv setBackground shape

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Use assets folder   sample code   InputStream is   null  try       is   this getResources   getAssets   open  test sample png      catch  IOException e             image   BitmapFactory decodeStream is

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Right click on Drawable Select New ---  Directory Enter the directory name  Eg  logo png the location will already show the drawable folder by default  Copy and paste the images directly into the drawable folder  While pasting you get an option to choose mdpi xhdpi xxhdpi etc for each of the images from a list  Select the appropriate option and enter the name of the image  Make sure to keep the same name as the directory name i e logo png Do the same for the remaining images  All of them will be placed under the logo png main folder

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Gradle with Android Studio could do it this way  link    It s in the paragraph  Configuring the Structure   sourceSets    main       java           srcDir  src java            resources           srcDir  src resources

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Actually  on Android Studio it is possible  You can have nested resources as shown here    There is also a plugin to group resources here  I recommend to avoid this though

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I ve wrote an eclipse plugin which allows to create virtual subfolder by separating the file name with two underscores     The project is in early stages  but don t worry it won t crash your IDE  more details can be found here  feel free to fork and send pull requests   https   github com kirill578 Android-Sorted-Res-Folder

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Subdirectories are not allowed  the resource must contain only  a-z0-9      No you have uppercase letters  and no forward slashes

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No  the resources mechanism doesn t support subfolders in the drawable directory  so yes - you need to keep that hierarchy flat   The directory layout you showed would result in none of the images being available   From my own experiments it seems that having a subfolder with any items in it  within the res drawable folder  will cause the resource compiler to fail -- preventing the R java file from being generated correctly

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Not mine but I found this thread when looking for this issue  if your using Android Studio and Gradle Build system its pretty easy no plugins necessary just a little build file editing  https   stackoverflow com a 22426467 618419

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create a folder in main   like   res notification btn   and create tree folder in  like  drawable  or  layout   then in  build gradle  add this  sourceSets                               main                                       res                                               srcDirs     src main res notification btn    src main res                         or                         srcDir  src main res notification btn

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The workaround I m using  and the one Android itself seems to favor  is to essentially substitute an underscore for a forward slash  so your structure would look something like this   sandwich tunaOnRye png sandwich hamAndSwiss png drink coldOne png drink hotTea png   The approach requires you to be meticulous in your naming and doesn t make it much easier to wrangle the files themselves  if you decided that drinks and sandwiches should really all be  food   you d have to do a mass rename rather than simply moving them to the directory   but your programming logic s complexity doesn t suffer too badly compared to the folder structure equivalent   This situation sucks indeed  Android is a mixed bag of wonderful and terrible design decisions  We can only hope for the latter portion to get weeded out with all due haste

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There is a workaround for this situation  you can create a resVector  for example  folder on the same level as default res folder  There you can add any drawable-xxx resource folders there   resVector -drawable -layout -color   After that all you need is to add   sourceSets           main res srcDirs     src main resVector          into your build gradle file  inside android

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I like to use a simple script to flatten an organized directory structure provided by designers to something that can be used to generate an R file   Run with current path in drawable-hdpi       bin bash DIRS  find   -type d  for dir in   DIRS    do    for file in  ls   dir     do     mv   dir    file     dir    file     done    rmdir   dir   done

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One way to partially get around the problem is to use the API Level suffix  I use res layout-v1  res layout-v2 etc to hold multiple sub projects in the same apk  This mechanism can be used for all resource types   Obviously  this can only be used if you are targeting API levels above the res layout-v  you are using   Also  watch out for the bug in Android 1 5 and 1 6  See Andoroid documentation about the API Level suffix

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usr bin env ruby    current dir should be drawable-hdpi  etc    nuke all symlinks Dir foreach        f      File delete f  if File symlink  f       symlink all resources renaming with underscores Dir glob       png     f      system  ln -s   f    f gsub             if f include

[android] Can the Android drawable directory contain subdirectories?

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