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?
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.