Auto increment version code in Android app

Question

is there a way to auto-increment the version code each time you build an Android application in Eclipse?

According to http://developer.android.com/guide/publishing/versioning.html, you have to manually increment your version code in AndroidManifest.xml.

I understand, you have to run a script before each build which would, e.g. parse AndroidManifest.xml file, find the version number, increment it and save the file before the build itself starts. However, i couldn't find out how and if Eclipse supports runnings scripts before/after builds.

I have found this article about configuring ant builder, but this is not exactly about Android and I fear this will mess up too much the predefined building steps for Android?

Should be a common problem, how did you solve it?

Well, one can do this manually, but as soon as you forget to do this chore, you get different versions with the same number and the whole versioning makes little sense.

Answer 1

Here is the Java version for what it's worth. Also handling multiple manifests.

String directory = "d:\\Android\\workspace\\";

String[] manifests = new String[] 
{
        "app-free\\AndroidManifest.xml",
        "app-donate\\AndroidManifest.xml",
};

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    new version_code().run();
}

public void run()
{
    int I = manifests.length;
    for(int i = 0; i < I; i++)
    {
        String path = directory + manifests[i];

        String content = readFile(path);
        Pattern         versionPattern = Pattern.compile( "(.*android:versionCode=\")([0-9]+)(\".*)", Pattern.DOTALL );
        Matcher m = versionPattern.matcher(content);

        if (m.matches())
        {
            int code = Integer.parseInt( m.group(2) ) + 1;

            System.out.println("Updating manifest " + path + " with versionCode=" + code);

            String newContent = m.replaceFirst("$1" + code + "$3");

            writeFile(path + ".original.txt", content);
            writeFile(path, newContent);
        }
        else
        {
            System.out.println("No match to update manifest " + path);
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

All credit goes to ckoz, but I writed my own implementation in c#. I think it's a little faster and doesn't eat errors because If something goes wrong probably something is wrongly configured and I should know about it.

namespace AndroidVersionCodeAutoIncrement
{
    using System.IO;
    using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

    public class Program
    {
        private static readonly Regex VersionCodeRegex = new Regex("android:versionCode=\"(?<version>.*)\"", RegexOptions.Compiled);

        public static void Main()
        {
            using (var manifestFileStream = File.Open("AndroidManifest.xml", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.ReadWrite))
            using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(manifestFileStream))
            {
                var manifestFileText = streamReader.ReadToEnd();

                var firstMatch = VersionCodeRegex.Match(manifestFileText);
                if (firstMatch.Success)
                {
                    int versionCode;
                    var versionCodeValue = firstMatch.Groups["version"].Value;
                    if (int.TryParse(versionCodeValue, out versionCode))
                    {
                        manifestFileText = VersionCodeRegex.Replace(manifestFileText, "android:versionCode=\"" + (versionCode + 1) + "\"", 1);

                        using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(manifestFileStream))
                        {
                            manifestFileStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                            streamWriter.Write(manifestFileText);
                            manifestFileStream.SetLength(manifestFileText.Length);
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}