About Properties and Parameters

Properties are build-time settings that your project’s build script can access when building your project. At build time, the build process can access property settings to determine information, for example, the device for which your application is being built. As a result, you can set properties to manipulate how your application is built for specific platforms and/or specific target devices, including and/or excluding features for the devices your mobile application supports.

Note:
Your application code cannot reference property settings at run time. Use parameters for settings that are available to your application’s run-time code.

Parameters are run-time attributes that you can use in your application code. For example, at run time your application can access parameters to retrieve information about the resources included in the application to perform such tasks as loading resources. Another example is that your application code can access information about the device on which the application is running to branch the logic based on the needs of that specific device. For more information, see Using Parameters in Your Application Code.

When Mobile Designer builds a project, it runs the project’s resource handler before it compiles your application. The resource handler creates the com.softwareag.mobile.runtime.Parameters class that includes all the parameters.

System Properties, like parameters, can be accessed at run time, but in contrast to parameters, they do not appear in the Parameters class. Instead, you can access them using the System.getProperty method. Some system properties define default settings. For example, the system property ios.webview specifies which implementation of Webview must be used internally, UIWebview or WKWebview. Other properties can be used for any purpose.