Improve support for Android intermediate generated sources

[Tanish-Ranjan]

Android generates a lot of intermediate sources such as AIDL, Render script, C/CPP, etc. Unfortunately AGP doesn't provide any APIs to retrieve these files. R.jar is one of these intermediate sources which is crucial for Android development so as a workaround in #173 I have retrieved the file using the process task for the build variant however, in some cases the task may not be registered during the sync in which case the dependency for R.jar is not provided.

[github-actions]

Hi @Tanish-Ranjan, I'm an AI Support assistant here to help with your issue. While the team reviews your request, I wanted to provide some possible tips and documentation that might help you in the meantime.

Suggestions

• Leverage an init.gradle to trigger generation tasks and add generated folders to the IDE model, similar to how AIDL is handled in vscode-java:

  • “Android project doesn't include generated files from aidl” (vscode-java #2855):
    • Trigger the aidl generation task during import (eclipseModel.synchronizationTasks).
    • Add the generated AIDL output folder to the source folders so it’s visible in the IDE.
    URL: Android project doesn't include generated files from aidl redhat-developer/vscode-java#2855 (comment)

• Extend the same pattern for other intermediate sources (RenderScript, C/C++, R.jar):

  1. Add the relevant AGP generate<Variant><SourceType>Sources task into your sync/import tasks.
  2. Add each generated output directory (build/generated/...) to the IDE’s source path.

• Propose upstream AGP enhancements to expose intermediate source paths via the Android tooling model APIs, so that build‐server‐for‐Gradle can pick them up automatically.

Other references with low confidence

• Support for different types of Android projects (build-server-for-gradle Support for different types of Android projects #182):
  • Discusses extending support beyond Application/Library projects; may inform how to register tasks per project type.
  URL: Support for different types of Android projects #182

The team will respond to your issue shortly. I hope these suggestions are helpful in the meantime. If this comment helped you, please give it a 👍. If the suggestion was not helpful or incorrect, please give it a 👎. Your feedback helps us improve!