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Creating New Projects and Importing Existing Projects

This page covers the basic concepts of creating or opening a project in Android. It also explains the structure of an Android Project.

Start a New Project

**File New Project Android Android Project (Figure 1)**
Name the project. (Figure 2)
Choose an SDK Target (Figure 3)
Create a package name (Figure 4)

The Step by Step

New Android Project

Figure 01: Create a new Android Project

New Project Name

Figure 02: Naming a project

New Project Platform

Figure 3: Choose an SDK

New Project App Name

Figure 4: Set the package name

This process creates a fully functional standard Android application. It doesn’t do much, it is really a form of Hello World project. But it should be complete, should compile, and should be fully runable on an Android device. At this stage, it is often a good idea to select Project | Build All from the Eclipse menu just to be sure all is going well. If you have problems with some other project, then right click on that errant project in thePackage Explorer and chooseClose Project.

Running the Application

Now it comes time to run the application. I connected my Android Tablet to my development machine and selected my project in the Workspace Package Explorer on the far left of the Eclipse IDE. I pushed the green run button with the hint “Run TestAndroid.” The dialog shown below appeared.

Run As Android Application

When I picked up my tablet, the application was installed on it, and it was running correctly.

Importing a Project

Copy a working project into your workspace

File

Import

General

Existing Projects into Workspace

Browse for the directory that contains your project

Import Existing Project

Import Project Directory

If the Libaries (Project Build Target) aren’t set up right you won’t see a node in the Package Explorer that says something like Android 3.2. In Figure X, see that TestAndroid has a build target of Android 3.2, while there is no corresponding node in the TestOpenGl project.

No Project Build Target

Figure X: TestOpenGLdoes not have its Project Build Target set up properly.

Right click on the top node for your project and choose properties.
Turn to the Android Page and select an appropriate node, such as Android 3.2. See Figure Y.

At this stage, you should be good to go. For more details, bring up the project properties again, or continue to browse them, and turn to the Jave Build Path page. You can see the item in the filter list on the left of Figure Y.

Select project build target

Figure Y: Selecting the project build target

Occasionally you will get strange errors such as “unable to resolve target Android 4” from a project that you import. If you can’t seem to resolve them using any of the normal methods, then try right clicking on the project in the Package Explorer, and selecting Android Tools | Fix Project Properties.

The .Project File

One of the files that it pays to get to know is the .project file that is created by Eclipse, and that resides in the root of your project directory. This file must be present or the project will not open in Eclipse. It contains two sets of information that are important. At the top is the name of the name of the project as it appears in the Eclipse Package Explorer. The next section shows the four main steps that the IDE goes through when compiling a project:

Resource Handler
Precompile step
Java compilation
Valdek creation (ApkBuilder)

At the very body of the file is a quick description of the projects nature, which shows that it is both a Java and an Android project.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projectDescription>
<name>bcLibraryUser2_Codrington</name>
  <comment></comment>
  <projects>
  </projects>
  <buildSpec>
    <buildCommand>
      <name>com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.ResourceManagerBuilder</name>
      <arguments>
      </arguments>
    </buildCommand>
    <buildCommand>
      <name>com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.PreCompilerBuilder</name>
      <arguments>
      </arguments>
    </buildCommand>
    <buildCommand>
      <name>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</name>
      <arguments>
      </arguments>
    </buildCommand>
    <buildCommand>
       <name>com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.ApkBuilder</name>
       <arguments>
       </arguments>
    </buildCommand>
  </buildSpec>
  <natures>
    <nature>com.android.ide.eclipse.adt.AndroidNature</nature>
    <nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
  </natures>
</projectDescription>

Ninety-nine percent of the time you will never have to give this file a thought, but every once in awhile something will go wrong with it. The most likely problem being that the file might get last. As you can see, it is not really that difficult to recreat this file, or copy it in from a similar project. Most of it is identical from one Android project to the next, with only the name at the top differing.