setContentView - strange behavior if not using R.id.?

In my onCreate method for the first loaded Activity I have:

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
final int splash = R.layout.splash;
setContentView(splash);

This causes the app to crash. But if I use:

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.splash);

everything is fine. What gives?

The only reason I am experimenting with this is because I want to load different layouts based on a set of data-driven options that will come from another class dep开发者_开发问答ending on the customer's choices.

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I'm having a hard time believing that's actually causing the crash. Can you provide the exception?

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Most likely the other part of your code that's not pasted was trying to access resources of that content view BEFORE you had called setContentView().