Annyce Davis

Davis Technology Consulting

The Little Things: Confusing error messages

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This series is dedicated to the little things in programming that make you want to bang your head against the wall. Today’s post is about: confusing error messages.

The code

I added a navigation icon to an app bar using Jetpack Compose. Initially, the icon was a Material one. The code looked like this:

navigationIcon = {
    Icon(
        imageVector = Icons.Filled.ShoppingCart,
        contentDescription = null
    )
}

Everything worked perfectly. I had a nice little shopping cart icon next to the app title. Then, I wanted to use a custom icon with the Android Studio Image Asset tool. I created the icon and plugged it into the code.

navigationIcon = {
  Icon(
      imageVector = ImageVector.vectorResource(R.drawable.ic_logo),
      contentDescription = null
   )
}

However, this time, the Compose Preview wouldn’t render. 😔

The error message

org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException:  unterminated entity ref (position:TEXT ‰PNG   
IHDR...@6:155 in java.io.InputStreamReader@ 25a0b497)  at org.kxml2.io.KXmlParser.exception( Unknown Source) at org.kxml2.io.KXmlParser.error( Unknown Source) at 
org.kxml2.io.KXmlParser.pushEntity( Unknown Source)
...

My eyes jumped straight to the PNG in the error message. And down the rabbit hole I went.

  • Was the PNG corrupted?
  • Did it have too many colors?
  • Was the size too large?
  • And on and on…

Nothing worked. I restarted Android Studio, cleared the caches, still no dice.

Two days later

I stared at the code with a cup of coffee in my hands. And then I thought XmlPullParserException? This is a PNG. And so, I switched the imageVector property to a painter property.

navigationIcon = {
  Icon(
      painter = painterResource(R.drawable.ic_logo),
      contentDescription = null
   )
}

And yeah, it worked!

The error message was confusing and unhelpful. If it said, “This is not a vector image, it’s a PNG.” I would have spotted my error right away and moved on.

Just one of those little things. fin

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