How to make an old Eclipse project work on Android Studio w/Gradle?

Question

My company gave me a 4 year old Android Project that I have to fix. I've been used to working with IntelliJ and Android Studio for a while now. At first sight I saw this was an eclipse project and I've tried numerous things to get this to work on Android Studio, more specifically like the following.

I'm also trying to integrate Gradle in this project. But even after trial and error I do not get the expected result that I normally get with my own projects, note the arrows I usually get with my other projects. Now it looks totally different.

Any help or tips on how to get this old project back on its feet is highly appreciated.

check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SixOwb_2hE — Damini Mehra, May 16 '16 at 11:47
Depends on whether they used the NDK. If they used the NDK, then you're going to have some problems down the road. — EpicPandaForce, May 16 '16 at 12:00
How can I know what they used? :p there is no way contacting the older devs — Edito, May 16 '16 at 12:26

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

1

This could help you a lot:

Migrating from Eclipse ADT

Another critical thing is that if you are a keyboard-oriented programmer, it will take some time to get used to Android Studio's shortcuts. Even though it has some eclipse shortcut support.

Which can be easily found in here:

Eclipse Shortcuts

Good luck.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

Community

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answered May 16 '16 at 11:57

Tiago Dávila

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I followed all the instructions in the first link for 3 times now. And I missed 1 important sentence that saved my project, so may I add that it is extremely important to read the following line in the first link: Select the Eclipse ADT project folder with the AndroidManifest.xml file and click Ok. I selected the parent folder of my eclipse project which gave nasty results. – Edito May 16 '16 at 12:28

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 16 '16 at 12:00

You can follow the following steps, no need to export the projcet as Gradle, Android Studio (AS) provides this by default,

Go to File menu and select New -> Import Project

next from the File browser select your Eclipse Project folder,

click Next in the subsequent steps and lastly Finish to successfully import the project

There may be some dependncies of your project but you can read the instructions provided by the Android Studio import dialogs and handle them,

ask further if you need help.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 16 '16 at 12:04

In the worst case scenario, you can always make a project by the same name, copy the sources (and resources) into their corresponding package, move the relevant stuff from the old AndroidManifest to the new, and add the external dependencies (such as that Google Play Lib for example) through Gradle itself.

If the project uses NDK, then you're gonna have a bad time though, because that requires setting up the Gradle experimental branch.

How to make an old Eclipse project work on Android Studio w/Gradle?

3 Answers3