eclipse - Android resource IDs suddenly not final, switch()'es broken

Question

PREAMBLE: this question is quite obsolete, it was written when the preferred Android dev environment was Eclipse with the Android plugin.

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I had a Java Android project for a while. Today, I've updated the Android dev tools to the Google's latest. And the project broke - I get a bunch of "case expressions must be constant expressions" compilation error messages.

Turns out that the R.java file is being now generated differently. Formerly, it would have a bunch of

public static final int MyID=0x12340000;

statements; now, it looks (after a clean/rebuild) like this:

public static int MyID=0x12340000;

final is gone. So all switches on resource IDs that I had (and I had a few) are wrong. What happened, please? Is it just me? What's the rationale here? Is it documented anywhere? Can I bring final back somehow?

Answer 1

This happened about yesterday, when the SDK/ADT 14 got released:

As of ADT 14, resource constants in library projects are no longer final. This is explained in greater detail in http://tools.android.com/tips/non-constant-fields

There's a quickfix available from ADT 14: http://tools.android.com/recent/switchstatementconversion

To quote from the rationale:

When multiple library projects are combined, the actual values of the fields (which must be unique) could collide. Before ADT 14, all fields were final, so as a result, all libraries had to have all their resources and associated Java code recompiled along with the main project whenever they were used. This was bad for performance, since it made builds very slow. It also prevented distributing library projects that didn't include the source code, limiting the usage scope of library projects.

The reason the fields are no longer final is that it means that the library jars can be compiled once and reused directly in other projects. As well as allowing distributing binary version of library projects (coming in r15), this makes for much faster builds.