Android Application Development For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15

Working with Android’s Preferences Framework

In This Chapter

Seeing how preferences work in Android

Building a preferences screen

Working with preferences programmatically

Most programs need to be configured to suit a user’s needs (for the most part), with individual settings or preferences. Allowing users to configure your Android application gives it a usability advantage. Thankfully, creating and providing a mechanism to edit preferences in Android are fairly easy processes.

Android provides, out of the box, a robust preferences framework that lets you declaratively — and programmatically — define preferences for your application. Android stores preferences as persistent key-value pairs of primitive data types for you. You aren’t required to store the values in a file or database or in any other mechanism. The Android preferences framework commits the values you provide to internal storage on behalf of your application. You can use the preferences framework to store Boolean, float, int, long, and string elements. The data persists across user sessions — if the user closes the app and reopens it later, the preferences are saved and can be used, even if your application ...