Wednesday, October 28, 2009

View android source code in eclipse

It's highly desired to be able to examine and debug into android framework source code. Eric Burke showed how he figured out where to put the source code so that ecplise will associate the android.jar with the corresponding source code. Unfortunately, it didn't work after I followed him step by step.
Then I turn to procmon for help.
First, I start eclipse. Then, run procmon and add a filter of process name equals eclipse.exe. After I captured the file system activities when I tried to view a android framework class's declaration which ends in not finding the corresponding file. I noticed there is a failure on the following path: android_sdk_installation_folder\platforms\android-1.5\sources . Here we go, this must be the correct place to put android source code.
So, the solution is:
1. Create a sources folder in android_sdk_installation_folder\platforms\android-1.5\
2. Copy everything in android_1.5_cupcake_src\frameworks\base\core\java\ to android_sdk\platforms\android-1.5\sources

It's very likely that Eric is using an older version of android sdk which has different file structure from my android sdk 1.6r1. Though his blog isn't totally accurate for current version, I still want to thank him for showing me the right way to go with his smartness.

Update:
The step 2 isn't a good way to organize java file because it only put framework's source code in place. The best tool I'm aware of is this python script by Damon Kohle. He improved the one provided by Michael and it will adjust the source code organization to fit eclipse's needs.

3 comments:

sido said...

Thanks, it's very helpful.

Anonymous said...

Typo in title.

Unknown said...

Thanks, mxcl.