Android: Accessing string.xml using variable name

Question

I want to display a message to the user depending upon a prompt I receive from another part of the program. There can be a number of prompts & they are stored in an enum

Answer 1

What you could do is just enclose the line in a if/else if/else statement, or a switch.

String message;
switch(prompt) {
case PromptA:
    message = getString(R.string.PromptA);
    break;
case PromptB:
    message = getString(R.string.PromptB);
    break;
case PromptC:
    message = getString(R.string.PromptC);
    break;
default:
    message = "";
}

I'm not on the machine I usually develop on, so there may be some silly syntax error in there, but the logic 'should' work.

Answer 2

See Resources.getIdentifier: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/res/Resources.html#getIdentifier%28java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String%29 . You can try something like this:

public void showPrompt(Prompt prompt, String label) {
    String message = (String) getResources().getText(getResources().getIdentifier(label, "string", null));
    //show a dialog box with message
}

Try that out and see what that does for you.

EDIT: meh. Try this instead.

public void showPrompt(Prompt prompt, String label) {
    String message = (String) getResources().getText(getResources().getIdentifier(label, "string", "<application package class>"));
    //show a dialog box with message
}

Turns out you have to specify the your package identifier (so if your AndroidManifest.xml has com.blah.blah.blah as the Package put that in the third parameter.