android-prefgen

A Gradle plugin for generating typesafe helper code for using together with the Jetpack Preference library for Android.

For learning about how to use Jetpack Preference, please have a look at the official user guide.

For whom is this plugin?

This plugin is for developers who build settings UIs using XML files, and who want to maintain typesafe code without having to hardcode preference keys in Kotlin/Java code. For this exact purpose, prefgen generates a PrefR class that contains constants of the properties defined in the XML file, and will synchronize them with any changes made to those files.

Additionally, it generates an implementation of PreferenceFragmentCompat for every XML preferences file. This implementation takes care about loading the XML file, and it provides type safe getters to access defined properties. The naming of the generated fragment classes is based on the XML file names. As an example, my_preferences.xml will generate PreferenceFragmentMyPreferences.

Both PrefR and fragment classes are generated by default, unless disabled in the configuration.

Getting started

The plugin is not published on the Gradle plugins repository. Instead, it relies on JitPack as a repository.

First, you need to declare the JitPack repository and the dependency in your buildscript (this is usually done in the root build.gradle):

buildscript {
    repositories {
        // other repositories
        maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
    }
    dependencies {
        // other dependencies
        classpath 'com.github.kremi151:prefgen:1.0.0'
    }
}

Next, apply the plugin in the build.gradle file of your app module:

apply plugin: 'lu.kremi151.prefgen'

Then, configure the plugin to your liking:

prefgen {
    packageName = rootProject.applicationId // This must be set
    generateFragments = true                // Generate typesafe fragments by default
    generatePrefR = true                    // Generate PrefR by default
}

Sources are generated when building the app.