How does one declare the type of an Android preference?

Question

I have a preferences.xml that looks like this:

Answer 1

In your preferences xml you can add an option android:numeric with the value "integer". This way the user should only be able to enter a valid integer value.

When loading the setting you should try to parse it to a number yourself (as all values are stored as Strings (@mbaird below)):

try {
  float val = Float.parseFloat(sp.getString("sample", "3.0f"));
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
  // "sample" was not an integer value
  // You should probably start settings again
}