naming convention for passing data through extras in android

Question

when passing extras such as Intent.putExtra("myName", myName), what's the convention for the name of the extra?

ie: if passing data between two activities, both would put/extract data under the id "myName", but should I just hardcode "myName" everywhere, or keep the value in the R.values.string?

Answer 1

Hardcoding is definitely not an ideal solution.

The convention used in the Android framework is to create public static final constants named EXTRA_FOO (where FOO is the name of your key) like Intent.EXTRA_ALARM_COUNT

The actual value of the constant is a name spaced string to avoid conflicts: "android.intent.extra.ALARM_COUNT"

If you don't want to create dependencies between your Activities with constants, then you should consider putting these keys into string values within your strings.xml file. I tend to follow the same naming convention when defining the keys in xml:

<string name="EXTRA_MY_NAME">com.me.extra.MY_NAME</string>

It still reads like a static constant from the Java side:

getString(R.string.EXTRA_MY_NAME);