Reader Feedback: Manifest Permissions Editor

[UPDATE: 13 Feb, 2011: This problem now longer exists in ADT 9.0.0 (the version right after 0.9.9).]

The Android Manifest file editor within Eclipse provides a number of useful editing tabs to wrangle the complexities of this file. One such tab is the Permissions tab. Use the Permissions tab to manage the permissions that your application uses and grants to others.

If you've been working with Android for a while, then you may be familiar with the permissions listed in the drop-down when you register a new permission using the uses-permission tag. We refer to this feature in both our books; specifically in Sam's Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours, Hour 5, "Configuring the Android Manifest File."

Unfortunately, a recent update to the Android Development Tools plugin removed this drop-down. We're not sure if it's a bug or not yet, but the drop-down disappeared in the software update between ADT 0.9.8 or ADT 0.9.9.

What used to look like:

Permissions tab from ADT 0.9.7 showing the drop-down list of values

Now looks like:

Permissions tab from ADT 0.9.9, with the corresponding Browse... dialog

When you press the Browse... button, the dialog comes up.

The field provided still works for typing in permissions values by hand, instead of selecting them from a list. The alternate method, editing the XML file directly from the last tab, hasn't changed at all.

So where is one to get these values to type in yourself? On page 90 and 91 of the SAMS book, we've listed a number of the most common permission values. However, the best place to get the appropriate values for your applications is from the Android SDK documentation. Permissions are defined in the documentation for the android.Manifest.permission class. Also conveniently listed with these values is a short description of what they enable the application to do. Before including a permission within your application, always check the documentation to determine if that is the most appropriate one to use.

Reader Feedback: Trivia Quiz Server Bug

Bugs happen! 

In Hour 17 of Sam's Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours, you learn about AsyncTasks. You use one to send a request to the server to add a friend based upon their email address. What's supposed to happen is that the server looks up the email address and if it finds a match, it adds that user to your list of friends, which is stored on the server. Then, when the Scores Screen is updated to download scores of your friends, the server will return XML containing just that. It will not return email address or anything like that -- we don't want privacy leaks.

What was happening?

Nothing!

Nothing? That's right. The server was failing to find any friends -- regardless of the email address. It was, however, returning the correct status. We just didn't bother with doing anything more with the status than printing it out to LogCat. Whoops.

Fixed

The fix was simple. The Google App Engine server has been updated to version 3 and, after some brief testing, we promoted this to the default server.

If you were having trouble with adding friends, now you know why.

This report was sent in by a reader. If you have troubles, please don't hesitate to contact us at androidwirelessdev@gmail.com or right here on this blog. We see all comments. It might just be a bug!

When "Eclipse loading framework information into layout resource editor" Fails

The Android Development Plug-in for Eclipse is a great tool many Android developers rely upon. I personally use some features much more than others. For example, I rarely use the Layout Resource editor to preview layout files. Instead, I just edit the XML directly and run it in the Emulator. (I have also been known to edit HTML with notepad, that's just how I roll.)

So it came as a bit of a surprise (read: annoyance) when I tried to do just that--preview a layout file in Eclipse--the other day and it failed. Eclipse seemed to try to load the layout designer saying, "Eclipse is loading framework information and the Layout library from the SDK folder." Then it up and failed to load it. Over and over. You couldn't see the layout preview, nor the Properties pane or the Outline mode to add new controls to the layout tree.

You might be wondering why I bothered to investigate this since I could have just gone back to the XML and blown it off. Well, I needed a screenshot of the Layout preview mode for our new book. Nuff said.

At first, I thought it was just me overestimating the tool's abilities, trying to preview a layout that was too complex for the preview (this happens often when I include some of the more complex View controls in layouts). So I created a new project with its simple default layout file, and that didn't load either. So that wasn't it.

I did a quick search on the Android developer forums and a couple people were complaining on the forums about this over a year ago. One person suggested recreating your workspace. Well, that didn't work, either. I widened my search to the web and ran across a little note on Brian Klug's wiki, suggesting that the older versions of the Android plug-in JAR files might be hanging around, mucking things up. Thanks, Brian! This sent me in the right direction.

We've had a number of new revisions of Android lately. which have improved (greatly) the Android tool chain, that have had several new JAR file updates. Next, I had to find the android JAR files on my machine. First, I checked where Brian had suggested: c:\eclipse\plugins (basically, in the plugins directory of the eclipse installation path). As my luck would have it, they were not there. Instead, a quick file search for "com.android*.jar" showed that they were hiding in C:\Users\YourUserName\.eclipse\org.eclipse.platform_3.4.0_867647348\features.

With a little investigation, I found several older versions (0.8.x and 0.9.0) of the android JAR files installed with the new ones (0.9.1 is the latest for Android SDK 1.5 r3). I shut down Eclipse, deleted all the older JAR files, leaving only the 0.9.1 versions.
Specifically, I only kept these two android JAR files:

• com.android.ide.eclipse.adt_0.9.1.v200905011822-1621
• com.android.ide.eclipse.ddms_0.9.1.v200905011822-1621

When I relaunched Eclipse, the layout preview began to function again. Incidentally, this was on a Windows installation of the Android tools. When I checked the Mac install of Android 1.5 R3, the JAR files were hanging about in (rather than the expected /Developer/Applications/eclipse/plugins~/.eclipse), but the layout preview did load without issue.