Hi guys, I'm new enough to Android development and am still getting to grips with the framework. I'm building a simple application that will display some products where each product will have a name, description and an image.
I'm using SQLite to persist the product data and have found that pretty straight forward so far. My question is around design and finding the best practice to solve my problem. My question is as follows... Where should I store the images (.png files) that are shipped with the application? Given my basic knowledge I see a couple of options here 1. Store them in the res/drawable folder and access them as standard resources e.g. R.drawable.image_name 2. Store them in the res/asset folder and access them using an InputStream. This way I could store a URI in the database for each image pointing to the file in the asset directory. These approaches are fine if the data remains static, however we want to add functionality where we will download new product data to the device from the web. When we download this data we can persist the name and description part in the database (no problems here) but I'm not sure what to do with the images. We cannot add these new images to the asset directory with the existing images as the asset directory cannot be written to at runtime. As far as I am concerned I have two options here 1. Use the MEDIA content provider to persist the image on the device internal data store and store the image URI in the database to identify the path to an image. OR 2. Create a folder on the file system and write my new image files to this folder. Then store the file path in the product database to identify an image (Not 100% sure this is possible, can someone please confirm) The problem with both these approaches is that there is an inconsistency between how my initial product images are stored and how the downloaded image updates are stored. This seems like poor design, to have your initial images in one place (res/asset) and your downloaded image updates persisted using the MEDIA content provder. I need advice on how best to approach this in terms of good clean design and best practice. I dont need specific code examples as I can figure out the implmentation myself once I've discovered what approach to take. Apologies for the long post but I've been looking at this for a few days now and have been doing quite a bit of head scratching. I'd like to start my Andorid development off using best practices so I was hoping some of the more experienced guys could assist. Thanks Brian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Beginners" group. NEW! Try asking and tagging your question on Stack Overflow at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-beginners?hl=en
