android - Best way to include pdfs in an app

Question

I have to develop an app which is basically a pdf reader: it is composed by a list, each list element is a pdf file name, when user clicks on a list element the pdf is popped out, read by a pdf reader installed on the device.

Now, problem is that i'd like to include these pdfs in my app. Till now the only way I found is to set them as resource, but the problem is that each time I want to display one of them I'll have to copy it in a public folder and this obviously takes time...isn't there another way?

Answer 1

You can add a ContentProvider to your app that streams the PDFs to the other process from the resource. For example, my StreamProvider extends Android's FileProvider to add support for serving files from raw resources or assets. The demo project, in particular, demonstrates serving a PDF from assets.