How to get all possible values of enum custom attribute?

Question

Assuming I have a custom attribute my_custom_enum for my views:

<attr name="my_custom_enum" format="enum">
    <enum name="first_value" value="751"/>
    <enum name="second_value" value="2222"/>
    <enum name="third_value" value="1241"/>
    <enum name="fourth_value" value="4"/>
</attr>

<declare-styleable name="CustomViewOne">
    <attr name="my_custom_enum"/>
</declare-styleable>

<declare-styleable name="CustomViewTwo">
    <attr name="my_custom_enum"/>
</declare-styleable>

is there a way to obtain all the possible values of this enum in code?

In other words:

I would like to have a way to obtain values 751, 2222, 1241 and 4. names of those values would be nice too, but are not mandatory.

Answer 1

The solution I ended up with is the one suggested by pskink in the comment: parsing the attrs.xml and extracting values myself.

There are two reasons that made it perfectly reasonable to do it this way:

1. I need this for a Unit Test (to know a bit more about that, read my conversation with pskink in comments under the question).
2. Pairs name/value are not stored anywhere. Only ints are used when using AttributeSet .

The code I ended up with is this:

public final class AttrsUtils {

    private static final String TAG_ATTR = "attr";
    private static final String TAG_ENUM = "enum";
    private static final String ATTRIBUTE_NAME = "name";
    private static final String ATTRIBUTE_FORMAT = "format";
    private static final String ATTRIBUTE_VALUE = "value";

    @CheckResult
    @NonNull
    public static Map<String, Integer> getEnumAttributeValues(String attrName)
            throws ParserConfigurationException, IOException, SAXException {
        final File attrsFile = new File("../app/src/main/res/values/attrs.xml");
        DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
        Document doc = dBuilder.parse(attrsFile);
        doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

        Map<String, Integer> fontAttributes = new ArrayMap<>();

        NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName(TAG_ATTR);
        for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) {
            Node attrNode = nList.item(temp);
            if (attrNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
                Element attrElement = (Element) attrNode;
                final String name = attrElement.getAttribute(ATTRIBUTE_NAME);
                if (!attrElement.hasAttribute(ATTRIBUTE_FORMAT) || !name.equals(attrName)) {
                    continue;
                }

                final NodeList enumNodeList = attrElement.getElementsByTagName(TAG_ENUM);
                for (int i = 0, size = enumNodeList.getLength(); i < size; ++i) {
                    final Node enumNode = enumNodeList.item(i);
                    if (enumNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
                        Element enumElement = (Element) enumNode;
                        fontAttributes.put(
                                enumElement.getAttribute(ATTRIBUTE_NAME),
                                Integer.parseInt(enumElement.getAttribute(ATTRIBUTE_VALUE)));
                    }
                }
                break; // we already found the right attr, we can break the loop
            }
        }
        return fontAttributes;
    }

    // Suppress default constructor for noninstantiability
    private AttrsUtils() {
        throw new AssertionError();
    }
}

This method returns a Map of name-value pairs that represent an attribute that has attrName.

---

For the example I wrote in the question, you would use this method like this:

Map<String, Integer> enumAttr = AttrsUtils.getEnumAttributeValues("my_custom_enum");