How to handle 2 different layouts in an activity Android

Question

[Edited]: I have already developed one application which works well on different screen size phones and tablets, I followed as per android guidelines to create the different sets of UI layouts to cater with different sizes of screens(phones and tablets) and all layouts will be in portrait mode. Everything works fine till then but now I got one new requirement where the layouts of tablets will be changed i.e. it will be having some extra information than phone layouts and all new layouts will be in landscape mode.

Now my doubts are:

1. In old implementation, all layouts name are same in different layout folders i.e. layout,layout-small,layout-large etc... so , as per new requirement, all layouts of large and extra-large should be in landscape mode but if i keep the same name of layout then how do I handle the orientation? At present, orientation attribute mentioned in manifest file for each activity.
2. If I keep the different name of these layouts then I have to handle at run time i.e. while loading the activity,based on checking on phone screen size and then load the respective layout, so same activity can load different layout based on checking screen size. Will it be a optimal approach to do so?
3. OR,Do I have to altogether introduce new activities for all new layouts to handle this scenario?

Please suggest me best approach to handle this scenario.

Answer 1

A good point to start on this would be official Android documents (below links).

1. http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
2. http://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-devices/screens.html

In a nutshell I can tell you would have to create multiple layouts to address your requirement for supporting multiple screen sizes/resolution. Within your application source directory you will have to create a different layout xml (with same name) under different resource-layout-directories as shown below:

 res/
        layout/              # default (portrait)
            main.xml
        layout-land/         # landscape
            main.xml
        layout-large/        # large screen devices (portrait)
            main.xml
        layout-large-land/   # large screen devices (landscape)
            main.xml