Organizing Layout in multiple folder using gradle

Your Android project’s   ‘res\layout’ folder is too big? Try making sub-folders using resource merging

In large projects, it´s very common that the resources as well as layout folder grows and grows and becomes hard to organize and maintain. There is a very simple way to create more layout folders. That way, you´ll be able to divide your layout in different categories like activities, , so it will be easier to keep track of what resources you created.

How to configure multiple resources folders

Gradle is a very powerful tool. It has many default configurations so that we don´t need to rewrite it every time we start a project. For instance, the resources folder is always in the path src/main/res. But we can alter this the way we want very easily from the sourceSets section:

This is how I got mine to work with an already built project.

1. Copy all of the XML files out of your layout directory, and put them into a directory on the desktop or something for backup.
2. Delete the entire layout directory (Make sure you backed everything up from step 1!!!)
3. Right click the res directory and select new > directory.
4. Name this new directory “layouts”. (This can be whatever you want, but it will not be a ‘fragment’ directory or ‘activity’ directory, that comes later).
5. Right click the new “layouts” directory and select new > directory. (This will be the name of the type of XML files you will have in it, for example, ‘fragments’ and ‘activities’).
6. Right click the ‘fragment’ or ‘activities’ directory (Note: this doesn’t have to be ‘fragment’ or ‘activities’ that’s just what i’m using as an example) and select new > directory once again and name this directory “layout”. (Note: This MUST be named ‘layout’!!! very important).
7. Put the XML files you want inside the new ‘layout’ directory from the backup you made on your desktop.
8. Repeat steps 5 – 7 for as many custom directories as you desire.
9. Once this is complete, go into your modules gradle.build file and create a sourceSets definition like this…(Make sure ‘src/main/res/layouts’ & ‘src/main/res’ are always the bottom two!!!! Like I am showing below).