Android Hilt, Retrofit2, and properties file issue

Question

I have a situation that I'm pretty sure is common, but I haven't found a solution for it in any tutorial. Perhaps I am approaching this in totally the wrong way.

I have a module that provides a Retrofit service:

    public static RestService providesRestService(){

        Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit.Builder().baseUrl("http://www.somedomain.com")
                .addConverterFactory(GsonConverterFactory.create()).build();

        return retrofit.create(RestService.class);
    }

I want the base URL to be configurable through a properties file. To use a properties file I need the Context so I can access the AssetManager:

AssetManager assetManager = context.getAssets();
assetManager.open("somefile.properties")
...

So I can use the @ApplicationContext annotation:

public static RestService providesRestService(@ApplicationContext){

and that should work for getting properties, but the PROBLEM is that I have another module that provides a class to handles properties files:

static PropertiesUtil providesPropertiesUtil(@ApplicationContext Context context) {
        return new PropertiesUtil(context);

So I want to use that class, but I cannot inject PropertiesUtil into another provides method.

Am I approaching this all wrong?

Answer 1

I went about this all wrong. The better way (in my opinion because you do not need to deal with Context) is to use buildConfig variables.

In the app/build.gradle file I added:

    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
            buildConfigField "String", "REST_BASE_URL", RELEASE_REST_BASE_URL
        }

        debug {
            applicationIdSuffix ".debug"
            debuggable true
            buildConfigField "String", "REST_BASE_URL", DEV_REST_BASE_URL
        }
    }

This will create a static String variable you can access via the auto generated BuildConfig.REST_BASE_URL

You can have add an app/gradle.properties file to have the following:

DEV_REST_BASE_URL="http://dev.example.com"
RELEASE_REST_BASE_URL="http://example.com"

Gradle takes the exact value to generate files, so you have to add the quotation marks, or else the BuildConfig.java will be like this:

public static String REST_BASE_URL=http://example.com;

instead of

public static String REST_BASE_URL="http://example.com";