Android: How to reset resConfigs for release variant?

Question

To make development faster, I want to do the following:

android {
    defaultConfig {
        resConfigs "en"
    }
}

My app has a lot of languages, and doing this saves significant time while developing. However, I do NOT want to release a version with this set. Unfortunately, resConfigs is not available on product flavors or build types, so I can't set it in debug {}, for example.

How can I automatically exclude resConfigs from release variants? I do not want to have to remember comment out that line of code when I'm building for release.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 03 '17 at 11:30

3

Wouldn't this work?

Detect the debug build, reset the configurations and add your desired debug configuration.

applicationVariants.all { variant ->
    if (variant.buildType.name == "debug") {   
        variant.mergedFlavor.resourceConfigurations.clear()
        variant.mergedFlavor.resourceConfigurations.add("en")
    }
}

answered Mar 03 '17 at 11:30

darken

807
12
25

`resourceConfigurations` is not a public member of `variant.mergedFlavor`. – AutonomousApps Mar 06 '17 at 01:59
@AutonomousApps Works for me. What Gradle version are you using? – darken Mar 06 '17 at 02:09
An old one. Tools 2.1.2 and Gradle 2.14. – AutonomousApps Mar 06 '17 at 02:10

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

My solution was inspired by this answer to a related question. Here's how you do it:

in app/build.gradle

// Reset `resConfigs` for release
afterEvaluate {
    android.applicationVariants.all { variant ->
        if (variant.buildType.name.equals('release')) {
            variant.mergedFlavor.@mResourceConfiguration = null
        }
    }
}

This works because mResourceConfiguration is the backing field for resConfigs. Unfortunately, The Android Gradle DSL does not currently expose a method to reset resConfigs, so we're forced to access the field directly using the groovy @<fieldName> syntax. This works, even though mResourceConfiguration is private.

WARNING: this solution is a little fragile, as the Android Gradle build tools team could change the name of that field at any time, since it is not part of the public API.

The solution didn't work for me, were there breaking changes with gradle? `variant.mergedFlavor.resourceConfigurations.clear()` did work though. — Henning, Mar 15 '18 at 16:13
I used this successfully on an older version of the Android Gradle Plugin (AS 2.x). I haven't tried it with AS 3.x and build tools 3.x. — AutonomousApps, Mar 15 '18 at 22:39

Android: How to reset resConfigs for release variant?

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