Saving and retrieving shared preference values in Android is relatively straightforward, but doing it safely can be problematic. For example, you may set a default value, then accidentally use a different default value when retrieving!

This post will cover creating PreferenceHelper, a class to safely access preferences of any type. There is also a related post covering creating a preferences screen in your app.

This entire post is available as a Gist, and as an example preferences project.

Creating strings

For the PreferenceHelper class, every preference must have both a key, and a default value. These should be stored in an xml file so they can be referenced easily (e.g. by the UI). For example, two boolean preferences may result in the following inside strings.xml:

<string name="pref_boolean1">boolean1</string>
<bool name="pref_boolean1_default">false</bool>
<string name="pref_boolean2">boolean2</string>
<bool name="pref_boolean2_default">false</bool>

Creating preference utility

The PreferenceHelper class needs to be constructed with a context, as preferences cannot be saved / retrieved without one. This is due to the looking up of strings which takes place, as well as context being needed for the SharedPreferences themselves. The class also keeps a reference to the shared preferences to be used for all actions.

For each data type (just boolean, string, and integer in this example), 3 things are needed:

  1. An enum of all preferences of this type, defining both the preference’s key and default value.
  2. A getter, which can be passed an enum to return either the saved value or the predetermined default value.
  3. A setter, which can be passed an enum as well as a value, to then save that value.

For example, if an app has just 2 boolean options (called boolean1 and boolean2), this will be the code for PreferenceHelper:

class PreferenceHelper(val context: Context) {
    val prefs = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(context)

    enum class BooleanPref(val prefId: Int, val defaultId: Int) {
        setting1(R.string.pref_boolean1, R.bool.pref_boolean1_default),
        setting2(R.string.pref_boolean2, R.bool.pref_boolean2_default)
    }

    fun getBooleanPref(pref: BooleanPref) =
        prefs.getBoolean(context.getString(pref.prefId), context.resources.getBoolean(pref.defaultId))

    fun setBooleanPref(pref: BooleanPref, value: Boolean) =
        prefs.edit().putBoolean(context.getString(pref.prefId), value).commit()
}

This can of course be easily extended to cover strings and integers, as in this article’s Gist.

Using utility

All of that work ends up in a utility that is very, very simple to use, whilst never having any risk of using the wrong default value, wrong data type, etc.

A simple use case where you want to get the value of a boolean, and then change it, then repeat the process with a string, would look like:

val prefHelper = PreferenceHelper(this)

val myBoolean = prefHelper.getBooleanPref(PreferenceHelper.BooleanPref.setting1)
prefHelper.setBooleanPref(PreferenceHelper.BooleanPref.setting1, false)

val myString = prefHelper.getStringPref(PreferenceHelper.StringPref.setting1)
prefHelper.setStringPref(PreferenceHelper.StringPref.setting1, "abc")

As enums are used for the preferences, it’s impossible to pass a string reference to getBooleanPref, and vice versa. This means preferences can be saved and accessed with complete certainty of their datatype and default value.