android - Honeycomb and TabHost specs

Question

I have a question about Honeycomb's backward compatibility. I have an app that supports 2.1 or higher and seems to mostly work on Honeycomb except when they start a TabActivity.

In particular, when I add tabs to the TabHost, I get the following exception

android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException: Resource ID #0x0

When looking at the code that throws this exception, I see that it's the tab spec that has a label and an icon. Inside the code, in the LabelAndIconIndicatorStrategy tries to inflate the layout file R.layout.tab_indicator which doesn't appear to be available.

    TabHost.TabSpec spec; // Resusable TabSpec for each tab
    Intent intent; // Reusable Intent for each tab

    // Create an Intent to launch an Activity for the tab (to be reused)
    intent = new Intent().setClass(_gameActivity, ScoreGameActivity.class);
    intent.putExtra(GameChangerConstants.STREAM_ID, _stream.pk().toString());

    // Initialize a TabSpec for each tab and add it to the TabHost
    spec = _gameTabHost.newTabSpec("score_game").setIndicator("Score", res.getDrawable(R.drawable.icon_field_gloss)).setContent(intent);
    _gameTabHost.addTab(spec);

Is there a new way of creating tabs for honeycomb that I don't know about? I've poured over the documentation but haven't seen anything that indicates a problem with what I've done.

I'd like to avoid having to use fragments at this point until we can do a more comprehensive restructuring of our UI widgets and I'd like to better understand this issue.

Answer 1

I believe I've found a solution, but because people are curious, here is the stacktrace I got when I ran into this problem:

05-17 13:09:53.462: ERROR/CustomExceptionHandler(500): Uncaught throwable in thread Thread[main,5,main]
    android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException: Resource ID #0x0
    at android.content.res.Resources.getValue(Resources.java:1014)
    at android.content.res.Resources.loadXmlResourceParser(Resources.java:2039)
    at android.content.res.Resources.getLayout(Resources.java:853)
    at android.view.LayoutInflater.inflate(LayoutInflater.java:389)
    at android.widget.TabHost$LabelAndIconIndicatorStrategy.createIndicatorView(TabHost.java:568)
    at android.widget.TabHost.addTab(TabHost.java:226)
    at com.myApp.ui.TabDialog.addTab(TabDialog.java:80)
    ...

At that line, I have code roughly equivalent to what sparky saw:

spec = myTabHost.newTabSpec("score_game").setIndicator("Score", res.getDrawable(R.drawable.icon_field_gloss)).setContent(intent);
myTabHost.addTab(spec);

Note that myTabHost is a TabHost and spec is a TabSpec.

Previously, I was initializing myTabHost like this:

//WRONG - This can CRASH your app starting at Android SDK 3.0
TabHost myTabHost = new TabHost(getContext()); 

To fix this problem, I started initializing the TabHost by doing this:

TabHost myTabHost = new TabHost(getContext(), null); 

And that fixed it! I would love to find a root cause, but I haven't yet been able to figure it out.