Android - ListPreference save to file or on entry click listener?

Question

My application has a preference file, "settings", which contains 10 key/value pairs.

The keys act as titles for the user, and the values are URL's

Both the key and the value are changeable by the user eg the first setting looks something like "example" with the value "example.com", when a user changes that setting, the key also changes. So the first setting would become "different_example" with the value "different_example.com". All stored under the "settings" preference file.

I have been managing this so far, by opening a dialog containing the current key/value pairs in an ArrayList that has an onItemClickListener that pops up a second dialog containing another ArrayList of the possible key/value pairs. When the new item is clicked, I remove the current setting, add the new one, then re-populate the initial ArrayList with the new settings. This works and allows both the key and value to be simultaneously changed and updated, however it looks awkward with the two dialogs.

I'd like to switch this all over to ListPreferences. As in, have ten different ListPreference items, one for each setting, that when clicked opens the listing of all possible entryValues, and when selected, updates the key from the entry name, and the value from the entry value, and saves this under the same "settings" file. I'm not seeing how to save ListPreferences to a specific file, so that I can call

SharedPreferences settings = getSharedPreferences("settings", 0);

anywhere, though

I've also been looking for some kind of click handler for what to fire when an entry is selected so I can manually update the "settings" file, but not having any luck. Does such a thing exist? Or is there another way for me to do this?

Edit: I can use OnPreferenceChange to manually set the new value, but this doesn't return the value name, eg the value used in the human-readable list. Any ideas on how to get that?

Answer 1

See if this can give you a jump start: How do I get preferences to work in Android?

If you customize your ListPreference and come across something like this How to make a Preference not save to SharedPreferences?

Answer 2

Ahh, well this seems incredibly backwards, but what I've done is set each ListPreference to have an onPreferenceChangeListener, and each entryValue for the ListPreference to contain the name as well as the value separated by an arbitrary string. Then in the onPreferenceChange, I can reference the new value (which now also contains the new key) turn it into a String[] split at the arbitrary separator, then assign the String[] 0 index as the new key, and the 1 index as the new value by using SharedPreferences.Editor after removing the original setting.

Unless there's some way to return the Entry name from the ListPreference's entryValues array, or to specify ListPreference to save to a specific settings file, neither of which is documented, then this will probably be the best solution for me.