Skip to content

Using Android Studio

Jump to bottom
Roger Hu edited this page Feb 25, 2014 · 61 revisions

If you find yourself highly dissatisfied with developing with Eclipse (i.e. having to restart whenever recompiles somehow don't work, too many window panes to find, poor XML editing/validation, etc.), you may wish to download a copy of Android Studio (http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html). It currently is alpha and there are updates to the IDE every week, so be forewarned.

Migrating from Eclipse

Since version 0.4, Android Studio now has the ability to import your Eclipse projects directly. When you do the import, your Java and XML resource files are relocated to src/main/java and src/main/res respectively. Gradle looks explicitly in the src/main directory and can compile successfully but will fail to include your .class files if they are not located in these particular directories.

The plugin will also generate a build.gradle. An example of what the file format is shown at: https://github.com/thecodepath/android_guides/wiki/Getting-Started-with-Gradle

Dependency Configurations

Android Studio gives you the option of using several different dependency management configurations. Normally when you import existing projects, it tries looking for Maven or Gradle-based project files (pom.xml or build.gradle respectively). You cannot switch dependency management systems after you've selected one.

Using Gradle in Android Studio

As of Android Studio and Gradle actually operate very much independently of each other. Even if your Android Studio compiles correctly, you may find NoClassDefErrors when it tries to execute the software in your emulator. When you make changes to the build.gradle, the changes will now be reflected in the UI (previous v0.3 versions did not).

Other Notes

  • One useful tip -- inside Edit->Run Configurations, make sure to clear LogCat per run. It's often easy to get confused of stack traces and this option clears the logging statements between each test run:

    image

  • If you're adding libraries that also define R.java resource files (such as the PullToRefresh library mentioned in http://guides.thecodepath.com/android/Implementing-Pull-to-Refresh or Google Play Services), you cannot add them as .jar files. They must be included as dependencies. If you try to include them as .jar files, you may encounter R definitions not found during execution time.

Created by CodePath with much help from the community. Contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required. You are free to remix and reuse, as long as you attribute and use a similar license.

Finding these guides helpful?

We need help from the broader community to improve these guides, add new topics and keep the topics up-to-date. See our contribution guidelines here and our topic issues list for great ways to help out.

Check these same guides through our standalone viewer for a better browsing experience and an improved search. Follow us on twitter @codepath for access to more useful Android development resources.

Clone this wiki locally