Storing and Accessing SharedPreferences - TechGeekD/android_guides GitHub Wiki
Overview
Often you'll find it is necessary to store certain options persistently throughout the lifetime of the application. Using the SharedPreferences class is the perfect way to do this! This tutorial will cover storing and accessing data using the SharedPreferences class.
Storing Data with SharedPreferences
In order to store data to the SharedPreferences you need to first instantiate an instance of the SharedPreferences like so.
Specifying a Preference File
SharedPreferences mSettings = getActivity().getSharedPreferences("Settings", 0);
The string Settings is the name of the preference file you wish to access. If it does not exist, it will be created. The mode value of 0 designates the default behavior, which is to allow read access to only to the application. There are other read/write permissions that can be specified, but are no longer encouraged for security reasons.
Using a Default Preferences File
If you wish to have a common preference file and don't wish to specify a file, you can also use default shared preferences too:
SharedPreferences mSettings = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(getActivity());
Using this way will default the preference file to be stored as /data/data/com.package.name/shared_prefs/com.package.name_preferences.xml.
Editing Preferences
The next step is to create an Editor instance of SharedPreferences like so.
SharedPreferences.Editor editor = mSettings.edit();
Then you can begin to add data to the Settings file declared when you instantiated the SharedPreferences like so.
int id = 1;
String username = "john";
editor.putString("username", username);
editor.putInt("id", id);
Once you are finished adding data you need to 'commit()' the edits by calling.
editor.commit();
That's the last step. Your data is stored and you can then access your data using the method below.
Accessing Stored Data from SharedPrefrences
Once you have stored some data to your SharedPrefrences you may retrieve this value and others by using the following method.
First you need to instantiate an instance of your shared preferences.
SharedPreferences mSettings = getActivity().getSharedPreferences("Settings", 0);
The string Settings is the name of the settings file you wish to access. If it does not exist it will be created. The mode value of 0 designates the default behavior.
The final step is to access the data like so.
String cookieName = mSettings.getString("cookieName", "missing");
This will either grab the value that was previously set with the key of "cookieName" or will return the string "missing" if it is not found. That's all there is to it.