Separate an Android project in several other dependents libraries

Question

I have a project named 'app-project' (abbreviate here as AP) that have a module "app". To make things reusable, this project depends on another project library named 'lib-android-network' (LAN) and his module lib. It depends on another project named 'lib-android-base' (LAB) and his module "lib". All these projects stay in the same directory in the hierarchy. I use Gradle and Intellij on Windows 8.1.

ex: directories: root/app-project root/lib-android-network root/lib-android-base

I start with project AP depends on project LAN, without project LAB.

to make AP see LAN my settings.gradle of AP was:

include ':app', "../lib-android-network", "../lib-android-network:lib"

and in build.gradle of 'app' module I have:

compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
compile project(':../lib-android-network:lib')

I don't know how (I have to make a lot of attempts until reach this configuration) but it works perfectly until now, when need the third, LAB, project.

As I say now I have LAN depends on LAB. So I put in LAN settings.gradle file:

include ':lib', '../lib-android-base', '../lib-android-base:lib'

And in build.gradle of LAN 'lib' module:

compile project(':../lib-android-base:lib')

It's the same idea that works for AP - > LAN dependency, but when I run Gradle against my first project I get this error:

Error:(37, 0) Project with path ':../lib-android-base:lib' could not be found in project ':../lib-android-network:lib'.

I think it's because the dependent projects should stay inside the parent project as modules, but Its not interesting for me, because I don't want to have duplicate the project one inside another to make it work. I want to leave same directory hierarchy level. I don't want to add Intellij modules dependencies too (unless sure work), cause before I reach the first worked configuration, I have a lot of problems doing this.

EDIT

Based on this answer and this example project I change somethings in my own project to make it more correct:

AP project:

settings.gradle:

include ':lib-android-network', ':lib-android-network:lib'
project(':lib-android-network').projectDir = new File(settingsDir, '../lib-android-network')
project(':lib-android-network:lib').projectDir = new File(settingsDir, '../lib-android-network/lib')

app/build.gradle:

compile project(':lib-android-network:lib')

LAN project:

settings.gradle:

include ':lib-android-base', ':lib-android-base:lib'
project(':lib-android-base').projectDir = new File (settingsDir, '../lib-android-base')
project(':lib-android-base:lib').projectDir = new File (settingsDir, '../lib-android-base/lib')

lib/build.gradle:

compile project(":lib-android-base:lib")

But I'm still getting the same error:

Error:(39, 0) Project with path ':lib-android-base:lib' could not be found in project ':lib-android-network:lib'.

--- EDIT 2 ---

it works if I repeat the settings.gradle configuration of network project into app project, but

include ':lib-android-base', ':lib-android-base:lib', ':lib-android-network', ':lib-android-network:lib'
project(':lib-android-base').projectDir = new File(settingsDir, '../lib- android-base')
project(':lib-android-base:lib').projectDir = new File(settingsDir, '../lib-android-base/lib')

But I guess I shouldn't have to repeat this configuration in my base application whenever I had to add a dependency to lib-android-network project. It will get confused...

Is there a "Best Practice" to deal with a several library projects? Which is the best way to deal with it? Is it adding each lib as sub module for the top project?

Answer 1

Although I haven't found a perfect solution. So far, the best solution I found was based on this blog post found by @hgoebl and posted in comments:

To describe here what I did:

I make a change on project lib-android-base: To test another different configuration I changed the module name 'lib' to 'lib_base' and left so, but there was no influence.

I change the IDE from Intellij 14.1.4 to Android Studio 1.3.1: I thought the android studio coped better with the imports made in Gradle.

On lib-android-network in the settings.gradle file I added:

//":base" here can be any word you use to name lib-android-base project in lib-android-network context.

include ':base'
project (':base').projectDir = new File ('../lib-android-base/lib_base/')

On lib-android-network/lib build.gradle file I added:

compile project (':base')

On my App Project settings.gradle file I added:

include ':base'
include ':network'
project(':base').projectDir = new File ('../lib-android-base/lib_base/')
project(':network').projectDir = new File('../lib-android-network/lib/')

and in App Project module build.gradle file I just added:

compile project (':network')

The only problem I not found a solution was the fact I had to reference the 'android-lib-base' in the App project, since I don't use it directly. But for me it's ok for now.