android project structure

11
Jun

Basics of Android Project Structure

Basics of Android Project Structure


Coding with android studio looks very promising because it is an IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA that is used for android application development. Even though we are not going to build android application , it is very important for us to understand the project structure so that we can code effective and understandable automation test framework.

There are five important components of Android Project Structure like main,gradle,.idea, app and External Libraries. Let us Discuss this in detail.

  • Main Project –This would be entire project context. Whatever you do in IntelliJ IDEA, you do that in the context of a project. A project is an organizational unit that represents a complete software solution. A project in Android Studio is like a workspace . In android Studio a project, can contain multiple modules. This means that, in theory it is possible to build multiple apps within the same project.
  • .idea –.idea is used for storing project specific metadata in Android Studio.
  • Project Module –This is the actual project folder where your application code resides. The application folder has following sub directories
    • build: This has all the complete output of the make process i.e. classes.dex, compiled classes and resources, etc.
    • libs : The lib folder is used for storing project specific jar files..
    • src: The src folder can have both application code and android unit test script. You will find two folders named “androidTest” and “main” correspond to src folder. The main folder contains two subfolders java and res. The java folder contains all the java codes and res contains drawables, layouts, etc.
  • Gradle – Gradle is used for configuration of build procress. We will see more detais about this in our nest post.
  • External Libraries -This is a place where Referenced Libraries and information on targeted platform SDK is shown.