Android project lessons learned

Quick post with some bullet points of lessons learned during my last Android project:

• To be able to keep strings in strings.xml apart, prefix them with the name of the Activity they belong to. So listOrdersOrderNr instead of just orderNr.
  


• If you inflate() a view without the parent, it won't take into account the parent's attributes like padding! Sadly apparently that trick does not seem to work in the getView() method. For that you'd have to compute the padding in dp and then set the padding of the view. E.g:
  
  

  float scale = getContext().getResources().getDisplayMetrics().density; float dpSize = 10 * scale; // So 10 would be the number of dp you want buttonRow.setPadding((int) dpSize, (int) dpSize, (int) dpSize, (int) dpSize);

  
  


• When using a RelativeLayout, make sure you refer to other elements using "@id/someId", and not "@+id/someId". If you use the latter, Android will just create a new id named "someId" and will place the layout starting from the top of your Activity. Pretty obvious this one (the docs say the "+" creates a new id) but still an easy one to miss... So don't do:
  
  

  android:layout_below="@+id/feedbackEmailLogsSeparator"

  
  But use:
  
  

  android:layout_below="@id/feedbackEmailLogsSeparator"