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I just started my work as an Android developer. My first assignment is to fix several bugs of an App call DailyFinance.

One bug is UI related, if you click a button on a certain page, a dialog will pop up, but the dialog is not displayed properly. My question is how can I locate the code (xml layout file as well as activities) related to the dialog quickly in the codebase which I am not familiar with?

0xmars511
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  • I would add that if you probably should get code into eclipse if not already there, and you should learn how to run the code in debug mode. Thats the best way to see sequence of code. – Code Droid Aug 14 '12 at 23:41
  • Another approach is to set breakpoints on all files that appear to be dialogs. And see if you hit that breakpoint when the dialog appears. – Code Droid Aug 14 '12 at 23:42
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    Many many programmers do not do as Gary suggests and waste a lot of time looking around. A sequence of searches is usually the fastest way to go. just realize that once you find the text reference in say strings.xml you will then need another search for the string handle. So first search should probably be against all files * or *.xml, second should be perhaps against *.java or class search. – Code Droid Aug 14 '12 at 23:45
  • also note that there is a design view on any layout so you can also look at layout in design view to see. – Code Droid Aug 14 '12 at 23:49

2 Answers2

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Couple approaches come in mind:

  1. Search for any text that displayed on the target dialog.
  2. Search button text and locate the xml layout file that that contains the button which launch the target dialog
  3. Once find the xml layout file, determine the button 'id' as xxxxx, then you can further search for source contains references to 'R.id.xxxxx'
Gary S.
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    Good answer Gary, I would add that the text might be found in strings.xml rather than the layout depending on what they are looking for. – Code Droid Aug 14 '12 at 23:47
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Set breakpoints on methods in files that implement the dialog. So maybe search for dialog and then put breakpoints inside the dialog. See it it gets hit when your dialog gets pulled up. Or just see where the layouts are set in files that have the word dialog in them. look for R.layout.someLayoutName.

One other suggestion is for some difficult layouts where its tough to see whats going on you can use the HierachyViewer to see the runtime view layouts: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/hierarchy-viewer.html Its worth running on your app to see the structure of the layouts at runtime which is often hard to see these relationships in the layout files before they have been inflated.

BTW, I was a student of CS and the biggest mistake I ever made was not to learn the debugger inside and out. Its without a doubt the most powerful ally you have to learn as well as fix bugs. If you think about it, code really is only an abstraction until you see it running inside the debugger.

Code Droid
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