android - file:///android_res/drawable not working when using flavor with other package name

Question

My problem is that after I added flavors to my project the flavor with a package name different from the actual source seems to have problems with accessing the files in android_res/drawable.

More specifically I have a html-view that calls the following image.

<img src="file:///android_res/drawable/image.png">

The image shows up in the production flavor that has the package name which is the same as the directory of the java-files but it doesn't work for the beta flavor:

productFlavors {
    production {
        packageName "com.company.myapp"
    }

    beta {
        packageName "com.company.beta"
    }
}

where the actual directory with the java files is

java/com/company/myapp

It is rather strange that this happens since the resources are not even in that folder.

Answer 1

packageName is not supported in gradle. Gradle has a distinction between applicationId and packageName (see http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) which means that should be able to have the resources package name differ from the package identifier for your application.

Unfortunately that does not seem to be supported by the file:///android_res URL scheme in a webview.

I was able to workaround it in my case by creating an R class in the other package with the correct inner class and with a public static final int field that was initialized with the value from the real R file. This is a hack and doesn't survive renaming the resource and is not convenient if you have lots of resources you need to access.

So in your case that would look like adding this to your beta flavor source files directory:

package com.company.beta;

class R
{
    class drawable
    {
        public static final int image = com.company.myapp.R.drawable.image;
    }
}