Ashok Gelal

Setting up IntelliJ IDEA 12 with Maven + ActionBarSherlock + Roboelectric + AndroidAnnotations

December 11, 2012

For help, feedback, comments, and other discussions for this tutorial, please visit the official forum.

Over the weekend I spent almost a whole day trying to setup Android development environment with recently released IntelliJ IDEA 12. I’ve used previous versions of IntelliJ, on and off but at work we almost exclusively use Eclipse. I’ve tried using Maven before but I thought it was more pain than it was worth, and I almost never got it working perfectly. But almost all the Android/ Java developers that I know personally and follow on Social Networks look to use Maven. So, this time I was all into making it working no matter what. Honestly, I almost gave up, again.

Also, this is the first time I wanted to take AndroidAnnotations and Roboelectric for a spin. I’ve used ActionBarSherlock in all of the Android apps I’ve ever worked with but only in Eclipse.

Let’s see how can start using IntelliJ IDEA 12 for Android development along with AndroidAnnotations, Roboelectric, ActionBarSherlock, and Maven.

 

Adding ActionBarSherlock:

  1. The first thing that I’ve noticed with Android Maven integration is that the available hosted Maven Android libraries release cycle lag a bit behind than the official release. For an example, Android v4.2 is already out but the latest Android library available in Maven repo is just v4.1.2.

So, the first thing you want to is to arrange to use the libraries directly from your local Android SDK installation. This sounds difficult but it is crazy easy. Read and follow the instructions from maven-android-sdk-deployer GitHub repo to deploy the libraries. Don’t try to install everything in one shot (using mvn install). You are almost certain to get some errors; unless you have installed all the official platforms and add-on apis.

  1. Download and install IntelliJ IDEA 12.

  2. Download ActionBarSherlock library and unzip it somewhere. You want to keep this library around, probably for multiple projects. So, keep it in a safe, non-temporary place.

  3. Inside the ActionBarSherlock-X.X.X folder you will see a folder named library. Rename it to ActionBarSherlock.

  4. Fire up IntelliJ, and from the startup screen select Import Project.

  1. Browse to the unzipped directory from step 5, and select the ActionBarSherlock folder (the one we renamed from library in step 4).

  2. Select Create project from existing sources radio button and click Next.

  3. Keep clicking Next until you see a Finish button. Click it to finish the import.

  4. Select View>Tool Windows>Maven Projects to bring up the Maven Window. The ActionBarSherlock library should be listed along with Profiles.

  5. Expand ActionBarSherlock>Lifecycle, and select compile. Click the green run button to build it.

At this point we are done setting up the ActionBarSherlock as an IntelliJ library. Now, we will create the actual project.

 

Creating your main project:

  1. Select File > New Project and select Application Module.

  2. Provide Project name. Let’s call it MyAwesomeAndroidApp for the sake of this post.

  3. Change project SDK to Android 4.1.2 Platform, and click Next.

  4. In the next screen, again, for the sake of this post, change the Activity name to MainActivity and click Finish.

  5. From the next dialog that pops up, select This Window (it really doesn’t matter which one you choose).

  6. Let’s rebuild the project once – Build > Rebuild Project

  7. Open up AndroidManifest.xml file and change the min sdk version to 10, and set target sdk version to 16. The manifest should look something like:

    <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“utf-8”?> <manifest xmlns:android=“http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”

           package="com.example.MyAwesomeAndroidApp"
       android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0">
 <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="10" android:targetSdkVersion="16"/>
 <application android:label="@string/app_name" android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher">
     <activity android:name=".MainActivity_" android:label="@string/app_name">
         <intent-filter>
             <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
             <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
         </intent-filter>
     </activity>
 </application>

  8. Try running your app now in an emulator. Your app should compile and run without any errors.

  9. From the project selector on the left, select the MyAwesomeAndroidApp project, and go to File > Project Structure.

  10. Change the Project language level to 6.0 – @Override in interfaces.

  11. Select Modules on the left, and from the header of middle pane, click + , and select Import Module.

  12. Go to the ActionBarSherlock project that we created before, and select the ActionBarSherlock.iml file. Do not select the folder, just the .iml file.

  1. Click OK. You will be asked to restart the IDE. Just click YES. After restarting, run your application again to make sure that the new changes haven’t cause you any harm.

 

Using ActionBarSherlock:

  1. Open MainActivity.java and instead of extending Activity, extend SherlockActivity. IntelliJ should intelligently ask you to Add dependency on module ‘ActionBarSherlock’. If not, try hitting ALT+Enter

  1. Try running your app again. You should get a compiler error about duplicate R.java file. To fix, expand ActionBarSherlock project, right click on the target folder, and from the context menu select Mark Directory As > Excluded.

This should fix the duplicate file error but you will get another compiler error if you try to run it – UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL EXCEPTION. What the heck, right? The problem is that both ActionBarSherlock and our project is trying to load the same android support library. We need to tell ActionBarSherlock project that the support library will be provided, and it should not try to include and compile it. To fix this error, bring up the Project Structure window, (File > Module Settings or F4), select ActionBarSherlock project, select Dependencies tab. From the list of dependencies, change the Scope of android-support-v4.jar to Provided from Compile. Run the app now. It should compile and run fine.

 

Adding Maven Support:

Let’s convert our project to Maven project.

  1. Right click the MyAwesomeAndroidApp project and select Add Framework Support… and from the list select Maven, and click OK.

  2. The editor will open the pom.xml file for you ready to change the groupId, artifactId, and version.

  3. Change groupdId to something like com.example.myawesomeapp, and artifactId to MyAwesomeAndroidApp.

If you look carefully, you will find that the project layout has slightly changed after you added the Maven support. The src folder now has a main and a test folder.

  1. Now, if you go to MainActivity.java you will find red all over the place. It is because after we added the Maven support, it unlinked the ActionBarSherlock. For now ALT+Enter and select Add dependency on module ‘ActionBarSherlock’. We will fix it permanently when we add dependencies to our pom.xml file.

  2. Run your app to be sure.

Now we will add the android maven plugin to our pom.xml file.

  1. Add the following just before the closing <project> tag.

    finalName>${project.artifactId}</finalName>
<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <!-- See http://code.google.com/p/maven-android-plugin/ -->
        <groupId>com.jayway.maven.plugins.android.generation2</groupId>
        <artifactId>android-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.4.1</version>
        <configuration>
            <sdk>
                <platform>8</platform>
            </sdk>
        </configuration>
        <extensions>true</extensions>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

Adding Roboelectric:

We will now add support for Roboelectric as well as jUnit for unit testing our project.

  1. Add the following dependencies just before the opening <build> tag.

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<dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.pivotallabs</groupId>
            <artifactId>robolectric</artifactId>
            <version>1.1</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
            <version>4.10</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.actionbarsherlock</groupId>
            <artifactId>actionbarsherlock</artifactId>
            <version>4.2.0</version>
        </dependency>
</dependencies>

  1. Also, let’s add a unit test for the MainActivity class. Go to MainActivity.java class, Alt+Enter on the MainActivity (the class name), and select Create Test. 3. Change the Testing library to JUnit4 and click OK. Select OK on the next dialog. The editor should open MainActivityTest.java class ready for adding your test. 4. Replace the content of MainActivityTest.java with the following:

    package com.example.MyAwesomeAndroidApp;

    import com.xtremelabs.robolectric.RobolectricTestRunner; import org.junit.Test; import org.junit.runner.RunWith;

    import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.equalTo; import static org.junit.Assert.assertThat;

    @RunWith(RobolectricTestRunner.class) public class MainActivityTest {

      @Test
  public void shouldHaveProperAppName() throws Exception{
       String appName = new MainActivity().getResources().getString(R.string.app_name);
       assertThat(appName, equalTo("MyAwesomeAndroidApp"));
  }

    }

  2. Within the test file, right click, select Run > MainActivityTest

  3. At this point if you get a !!! JUnit version 3.8 or later expected error than the JUnit 3 library is getting precedence over JUnit 4. To fix this, bring the module settings dialog (File > Module Settings or F4), select MyAwesomeAndroidApp module, select Dependencies tab, select Maven: junit:junit:4.10 entry and clicking the up arrow at the bottom, move it to the top – before the Android 4.1.2 Platform entry.

  4. Try running the test again. The test should pass with few binding shadow class warnings. If you look closely, all these warnings point to some kind of Map related APIs. This means Roboelectric cannot find the Google maps API library. To fix this, add the following dependency in your pom.xml file just before the roboelectric dependency entry:

        <groupId>com.google.android.maps</groupId>
    <artifactId>maps</artifactId>
    <version>17_r1</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>

    </dependency

  5. Run the test again. You should get no warnings.

Adding AndroidAnnotations:

Before you start, first find out where the maven repository is on your local computer. On my Mac, it is under ~/.m2 which maps to /Users/ashokgelal/.m2.

  1. Start by adding AndroidAnnotations Maven dependencies. Add following to your pom.xml file before the closing <dependencies> tag:

     <groupId>com.googlecode.androidannotations</groupId>
 <artifactId>androidannotations</artifactId>
 <version>2.7</version>
 <scope>provided</scope>


     <groupId>com.googlecode.androidannotations</groupId>
 <artifactId>androidannotations-api</artifactId>
 <version>2.7</version>

  2. Open IntelliJ IDEA preferences/ settings (on Mac, IntelliJ > Preferences… or cmd + ,)

  3. From the Settings dialog, expand Compiler and select Annotation Processors

  4. The middle pane should list two projects. Select MyAwesomeAndroidApp.

  5. From the right-most panel, check Enable annotation processing.

  6. Select Processor path: radio button and provide this value for the path:

    /repository/com/googlecode/androidannotations/androidannotations/2.7/androidannotations-2.7.jar:/repository/com/googlecode/androidannotations/androidannotations-api/2.7/androidannotations-api-2.7.jar:/repository/com/sun/codemodel/codemodel/2.4.1/codemodel-2.4.1.jar

Don’t forget to replace <YOUR .m2 PATH> with the path to your local .m2 repo.

  1. For the Store generated sources relative to: option, select Module content root radio button.

  2. For the Production sources directory, type gen/aa

  3. For the Test sources directory, type gen/aa-test

  1. Replace the contents of MainActivity.java with the following:

    import com.actionbarsherlock.app.SherlockActivity; import com.googlecode.androidannotations.annotations.EActivity;

    @EActivity(R.layout.main) public class MainActivity extends SherlockActivity { }

  2. Rebuild the project.

  3. Open the AndroidManifest.xml file and changed the activity android:name from MainActivity to _MainActivity__

  4. Run your app. If a dialog box appears telling you that MainActivity is not declared in AndroidManifest.xml, change the Launch text to: _com.example.MyAwesomeAndroidApp.MainActivity__ If it still doesn’t work. Rebuild your project again before running it.

This seems a lot of work but believe me, after you do it couple of times, it is not that bad. I tried almost all the kickstarter/ bootstrapper projects and none of them worked. Also, they added a lot of extra stuff into my projects that I’m never going to need.

BTW, have your heard about LightPaper?

You can follow me on Twitter, or add me on Google+. For help, feedback, comments, and other discussions for this tutorial, please visit the official forum.

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Discussion, links, and tweets

By day, I ship code at MetaGeek, by night, I hack on my personal projects, and finally, when I get some off time in between, I also serve as a CTO for ClockworkEngine, LLC where so far we have launched two products - Spyglass and LightPaper. Call be a serial coder if you want.