Breaking change in cordova-android@15.0.0: renaming strings.xml to cdv_strings.xml

[AshleyScirra]

Bug Report

In #1818 (feat!: add partial night & day theme support) the commit included a change to rename strings.xml in the generated Android Studio project to cdv_strings.xml. This appears to be an undocumented breaking change going from cordova-android@14.0.1 to cordova-android@15.0.0 and has broken one of our Cordova plugins. We have the following in our plugin.xml:

        <config-file target="res/values/strings.xml" parent="/resources">
            <string translatable="false" name="game_services_project_id">$APP_ID</string>
        </config-file>

This refers to a file named strings.xml specifically rather than cdv_strings.xml. To support cordova-android@15, we have to change the file name. To support both I guess we need to have the tag twice to specify both names. Presumably any other Cordova plugins that similarly target strings.xml, themes.xml or colors.xml will also be broken for the same reason.

Problem

What is expected to happen?

Preserve filenames of strings.xml et al. for backwards compatibility, or clearly document a breaking change.

What does actually happen?

Undocumented breaking change in cordova-android@15.0.0.

Checklist

• I searched for existing GitHub issues
• I updated all Cordova tooling to most recent version
• I included all the necessary information above

[breautek]

Preserve filenames of strings.xml et al. for backwards compatibility, or clearly document a breaking change.

Because it is illegal to have two files that define the same keys, I don't think preserving the filename is feasible. The commit is noted as a breaking change (as indicated by the !) -- but I agree it also should be explicitly noted in the blog post.

For context, we are prefixing resource names so that we don't clash with plugins and to make it clear that these prefixed resource files are Cordova-managed should only contain cordova resources. In most cases, values in here are configurable without relying on <config-file>/<edit-config>.

In your specific use case, where you're just trying to add your own resources, it is better for your plugin to simply provide their own resource string file and use the resource-file directive.

[AshleyScirra]

For a quick fix I tried defining the config-file tag twice like this:

        <config-file target="res/values/strings.xml" parent="/resources">
            <string translatable="false" name="game_services_project_id">$APP_ID</string>
        </config-file>

        <config-file target="res/values/cdv_strings.xml" parent="/resources">
            <string translatable="false" name="game_services_project_id">$APP_ID</string>
        </config-file>

However this still doesn't seem to work - it doesn't seem to update cdv_strings.xml. Is the file now no longer modifiable this way?

[AshleyScirra]

In case it helps anyone else, I got it working with the resource-file directive - here's the plugin.xml content that works (adjust as necessary to use a unique filename):

        <resource-file src="MyPluginStrings.xml" target="res/values/MyPluginStrings.xml" />

        <config-file target="res/values/MyPluginStrings.xml" parent="/resources">
            <string translatable="false" name="game_services_project_id">$APP_ID</string>
        </config-file>

Then for MyPluginStrings.xml just use an empty template like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<resources>
</resources>