Best practice on creating structure in resources

Question

the res/layout* dir of my projects are getting really messy lately and as there are afaik no subdirs allowed there to change that. So it is hard to get structure in there - how do you guys do that?

Answer 1

I don't know about others but for myself I like to use prefixes to help keep things sorted, essentially taking the place of subdirectories. For example, all my activity layouts start with 'activity_' and all my UI controls start with 'control_', notifications with 'notification_', etc.

I am then left with a flat directory with at least some structure, something like:

activity_graph.xml

activity_main.xml

activity_map.xml

control_graph.xml

control_title_bar.xml

notification_just_label.xml

notification_with_progress_bar.xml

...

It's not perfect, but it works for me.

Answer 2

Sorry subfolder inside the layout folder is not possible other than docs specification.

Just check this and this and this question.

Answer 3

Another possibility is to refactor some elements of your application into libraries.

For example you could extract unrelated fragments (as fragments should per se be unrelated) into libraries, mark that project as an Android library (check "Is library" in project properties) and then use your own libraries in your main project.

The resources you need within the separate libs will not collide anymore, but will be "thrown together" at build time, so access is fine.

Here are the docs for that.