how to access the drawable resources by name in android

Question

In my application, I need to get the some bitmap drawables somewhere where I do not want to keep the reference R. So I create a class DrawableManager to manage the drawables.

public class DrawableManager {
    private static Context context = null;

    public static void init(Context c) {
        context = c;
    }

    public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {
        return R.drawable.?
    }
}

Then I want to get the drawable by name somewhere like this( the car.png is put inside the res/drawables):

Drawable d= DrawableManager.getDrawable("car.png");

However as you can see, I can not access the resources by the name:

public static Drawable getDrawable(String name) {
    return R.drawable.?
}

Any alternatives?

Answer 1

Note that your approach is almost always the wrong way to do things (better to pass the context into the object itself that is using the drawable than keeping a static Context somewhere).

Given that, if you want to do dynamic drawable loading, you can use getIdentifier:

Resources resources = context.getResources();
final int resourceId = resources.getIdentifier(name, "drawable", 
   context.getPackageName());
return resources.getDrawable(resourceId);