Android Tutorial

By : Ketan Bhimani

294 

Finding Preferences Data on the Android File System

Internally, application preferences are stored as XML files. You can

access the preferences file using DDMS using the File Explorer. You

find these files on the Android file system in the following directory:

/data/data//shared_prefs/.xml

The preferences filename is the Activity’s class name for private

preferences or the name you give for the shared preferences. Here

is an example of the file contents of a simple preference file with a

preference in each data type:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8” standalone=”yes” ?>

Understanding the application preferences file format can be helpful

for testing purposes. You can use Dalvik Debug Monitor Service

(DDMS) to copy the preferences files to and from the device.

Working with Files and Directories

Remember from Chapter “Introducing Android,” that each Android

application is its own user on the underlying Linux operating

system. It has its own private application directory and files. Within

the Android SDK, you can also find a variety of standard Java file

utility classes (such as java.io) for handling different types of files,

such as text files, binary files, and XML files.

In Chapter “Managing Application Resources,” you also learned that

Android applications can also include static raw and XML files as