Alternative ways of getting the Icon Id?

It's up to personal preference whether you want to use an if/else statement or a switch statement, however for these matters a switch statement is typically recommended. Now, if you had hundreds or thousands of icons, you could use a different naming convention and assign them in a for-loop instead, using an array of images and an array of ids!

    public int getIconId() {
        HashMap<String, Integer> icons = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

        icons.put("clear-day", R.drawable.clear_day);
        icons.put("clear-night", R.drawable.clear_night);
        icons.put("rain", R.drawable.rain);
        icons.put("snow", R.drawable.snow);
        icons.put("sleet", R.drawable.sleet);
        icons.put("wind", R.drawable.wind);
        icons.put("fog", R.drawable.fog);
        icons.put("cloudy", R.drawable.cloudy);
        icons.put("partly-cloudy-day", R.drawable.partly_cloudy);
        icons.put("partly-cloudy-night", R.drawable.cloudy_night);

        return (icons.get(mIcon) != null) ? icons.get(mIcon) : R.drawable.clear_day;
    }

This is store all of the possible variations to be used in a HashMap with the string value from the forecast API as the key and the drawable id as the value. The ternary return statement reads as "If I have an icon set, give me the icon else, give me the clear_day icon."

I was a little bothered with the if/else if statement as well so this is what I did:

I declared a static member viable to hold that data ( did it as a member variable for easy alteration if other icon are added in the future):

private static String[] mIconPossibilities = {"clear-day", "clear-night", "rain", "snow",
            "sleet", "wind", "fog", "cloudy", "partly-cloudy-day", "partly-cloudy-night"};

---------------------the function--------------------------

 public int getIconId(Context context){
        //initialize value with default clear-day
        int iconId = R.drawable.clear_day;

        //check for matches
        if (Arrays.asList(mIconPossibilities).contains(mIcon)){
            String formatted = mIcon.replace("-", "_");
            String uri = "@drawable/"+formatted;
            iconId = context.getResources().getIdentifier(uri, null, context.getPackageName());
        }

        return iconId;
    }

----------------------------------the call----------------

//need to be call from an activity
getIconId(this); 

---------------NOTE --- UNSURE----- QUESTION !! ----------------------

I am not totally certain if this would be a more efficient way. Does passing the context around is a good idea? I don't know.

the functions: getResources, getIdentifier, getPackageName and replace are probably more resource intensive than a simple switch or if/else if.

thoughts on this anyone ?

cheers

I need to be able to access to the precise image resource among 200, so I've tried to implement this approach, but I had problem passing context.

Now, I am trying to adapt this solution:

http://envyandroid.com/creating-listdialog-with-images-and-text/#reslayoutactivity_countrycode_rowxml