Great, thanks Tor, Xavier.

All of that makes sense to me except for the bit about overlaying resources.

If we are talking about an apk that has a dependency on a single aar then 
you could I guess decide that the apk resources overlay those of the aar. 

But what about when you have 2 aars that have similarly names resources. 
The aars are likely to have been developed independently with the name 
clash entirely unintended/unexpected.

BTW when resources are provided to aapt using the "-S" flag how does it 
determine which resource is top most? First, last, arbitrary?

William

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 5:03:14 AM UTC+10, Xavier Ducrohet wrote:
>
> App override library resources, always. As Tor said, we don't care about 
> strings.xml, we do the merge on resources, not on files.
>
> Libraries are compiled with non-final resource IDs, and classes.jar does 
> not include the R class.
> R.txt is meant to clearly define what resources are in the library.
>
> App generate the final list of resources, merging resources from the app 
> and the libraries. We use aapt to generate the IDs for the combined 
> resources, using the app's package name and using final integers. Once this 
> is done we go through all the libraries and use their R.txt file to 
> manually generate a R class in their own package name. These are final 
> integers as well.
> (there's also some code to deal with the case where libraries have the 
> same package name, but we might move away from allowing this).
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 10:55 AM, Tor Norbye <[email protected]<javascript:>
> > wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 6:27 AM, William Ferguson <
>> [email protected] <javascript:>> wrote:
>>
>>> Can someone please explain to me how Resource id generation is going to 
>>> work now with AARs.
>>>
>>> Incorporating APKLIBs was slow but fairly straight forward. I have just 
>>> spent the last 48 hours trying to get the android-maven-plugin to build an 
>>> APK that depends on an AAR that has code referencing it own resources. As 
>>> part of that I have spent a large chunk of time trawling through the 
>>> android platform tools source and it's not clear to me that all use cases 
>>> have been covered. 
>>>
>>> So I hoping that someone can clarify a raft of questions that surfaced 
>>> as part of my investigations for which I couldn't find any doco.
>>>
>>> An AAR contains the following (plus some optionals)
>>>
>>>    - /AndroidManifest.xml (mandatory)
>>>    - /classes.jar (mandatory)
>>>    - /res/ (mandatory)
>>>    - /R.txt (mandatory)
>>>    
>>>
>>> In my APK that consumes this AAR I will presumably also have resources.
>>>
>>> Q1: What should happen when there is a name clash between the AAR and 
>>> APK for those resources? Eg
>>>     - AAR/res/layout/layout_main.xml  vs APK/res/layout/layout_main.xml
>>>
>>     - AAR/res/values/strings.xml  vs APK/res/values/strings.xml
>>>     - AAR/res/values/strings_a.xml (string1)  vs 
>>> APK/res/values/string_b.xml (string1)
>>>   Should the build break in any/all 3 cases?
>>>
>>
>> Case 2: they are unrelated. Value files can be named anything. This 
>> should not be treated as a clash.
>> Cases 1 and 3 are the same; for non-value resources, the resource name is 
>> derived from the file, so they both define @layout/layout_main. 
>> Again for case 3 the value of the file name doesn't matter, but they're 
>> defining the same string.
>>
>> I believe the right thing to do here is to treat this as an overlay: the 
>> app redefines the resource. At least that's how we treat the case where 
>> multiple flavors provide definitions for the same resource. Seems 
>> reasonable that a library would be treated similarly, though Xav should 
>> confirm.
>>  
>> Q2: Does/Should AAR classes.jar contain a compiled R class.
>>>
>>
>> No. The id's in the R class *must* be changed when the final app is 
>> assembled, so it's done at that time (it computes a global set of unique 
>> id's, then creates R classes for each namespace required by the various 
>> compiled classes, assigning those id's).
>>  
>> Q3: Should that R class have non-final fields. As suggested by 
>>> http://tools.android.com/tips/non-constant-fields?
>>>     If it has non-final fields then how are those fields updated to 
>>> reflect the the values generated during the APK build.
>>>     If they are not updated then how are id clashes from more than one 
>>> dependent AARs prevented?
>>>
>>
>> Id's in library cannot be final since if they were, they would get copied 
>> into the various classes.jar classes in the library, and could then clash 
>> with other libraries. By being non final, they will defer to runtime to 
>> look up the actual value, where they can find the id's actually assigned in 
>> the final app assemble.
>>  
>> Q4: If the AAR R class either doesn't exist or has final fields then the 
>>> final values will have been burnt into the compiled classes that use them.
>>>     During he APK build when the resource ids are generated for all the 
>>> resource contained in the APK (including the AAR resources), how are the 
>>> references in compiled classes updated?
>>>
>>  
>> Again, it creates multiple R classes, one for each library package, but 
>> ensures that the R id's are identical across these classes.
>>
>> -- Tor
>>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> Xavier Ducrohet
> Android SDK Tech Lead
> Google Inc.
> http://developer.android.com | http://tools.android.com
>
> Please do not send me questions directly. Thanks! 
>

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