Does data binding move UI logic out of the layouts? - android

I'm very new to data binding and am just beginning to have a look at the Android data binding library, and one thing in the documentation bugs me.
Using ViewModel components with the Data Binding Library allows you to move UI logic out of the layouts and into the components, which are easier to test.
Right after that, there's this - in the layout XML:
<CheckBox
android:id="#+id/rememberMeCheckBox"
android:checked="#{viewmodel.rememberMe}"
android:onCheckedChanged="#{() -> viewmodel.rememberMeChanged()}" />
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't that onCheckedChanged property contain a lot more "logic" in the layout than the old fashioned way of calling setOnCheckedChangeListener() on a "dumb" layout from an activity or fragment? It all seems a bit contradictory. Can someone explain to me how data binding moves "UI logic out of the layouts" ?

Your ViewModel now holds the logic, which you can test independent of the UI and the UI can be tested with mocked ViewModels. Its not always less code, its more structured code following a pattern.

Related

Some questions about Room and Paging Library

I am trying to set up all my lists with Room Persistance Library and Paging Library but I am facing some problems when implementing PagedListAdapter.
Question 1
I don't want to write any if, when... conditions in the onBindViewHolder so the scrolling is completely fluid. I have a model with its attributes. As an example, I want to set the visibility of a view that it is inside the layout (like a TextView) depending on a Boolean of the model, but I don't want to use an if. What would be the correct way of achieving that?
Should I create an Int attribute in the model which has the View.VISIBLE or View.GONE? But then the model can get very complex with lots of attributes and all of them are on all the model objects of the Room database.
Should I create another model which only has the attributes needed for the adapter UI? But then every time the real model is modified, I also have to modify the adapter model in order to see changes on the UI. And I think that's not good at all.
Do you know if there is somewhere where I can do this asynchronously in PagedListAdapter?
Question 2
I need to use functions like getString(R.string.resource), which requires a context. I also need to use Glide to load an image into an ImageView, but it requires an Activity context or Fragment context. I tried to inject it using dagger but that's not possible. It is safe to pass that context through the constructor? Or what is the best way of doing that?
(I suppose the same problem happens implementing RecyclerViewAdapter)
In my studied application I have table which save the current player state. This table I use in multiselect queries, so when I change this table, Paging library will change my DataSource. Example app.
I use Context instance from View instance with method View.getContext().

Solution to build dynamic forms with Android

I am actually developing an Android application on which I should display dynamic forms based on metadata contained inside JSON documents. Basically the way it works (without the details) is that a JSON document represent the structure of a form:
{
"fields": [
{
"name": "fieldA",
"type": "STRING",
"minCharacters": 10,
"maxCharacters": 100
},
{
"name": "fieldB",
"type": "INTEGER",
"min": 10,
"max": 100
},
{
"name": "fieldC",
"type": "BOOLEAN_CHECKBOX",
"defaultValue": true
}
...
],
"name": "Form A"
}
What I'm doing actually when the application receive one of those JSON documents is that it loop through each fields and parse it to the appropriate view (EditText, Checkbox, custom view, etc.), adding a tag to the view (to be able to retrieve it easily) and add the view to a LinearLayout. Here is a pseudo-code of how it is working actually:
//Add form title
linearLayout.addView(new TextView(form.name));
//Add form fields
for(Field field: form.fields) {
View view;
switch(field.type){
case STRING: view = new EditText();
...
}
view.setTag(field.id);
linearLayout.addView(view);
}
The issue with this is that with large forms (like >20 fields), it need to inflate lot of views and the UI thread suffer a lot. Another point to take into account is that a single screen may have multiple forms (one after another vertically sorted).
To avoid overloading the UI thread I thought of 2 possible solutions:
Using a RecyclerView.
Using Litho by Facebook.
But multiple questions comes to me when considering these 2 solutions:
Is it a good use case to use Litho? Or using a RecyclerView is enough?
What about the state of my views? If I use a Recycling pattern, would I be able to keep the state of each of my fields (even those off-screen) and so being able to save the form without losing data?
If I use a Recycling pattern to display one form, how would I handle multiple forms? Can we have nested RecyclerView? Forms need to be displayed one after another like inside a vertical RV but if forms themselves are RV, how should I handle this?
This is more a "good practice" question and giving the right way or one of the right way of achieving my goal than a need of a specific answer with code example, etc.
Thank's in advance for your time.
When architecting for the mobile application I would like to address the following questions:
Is it a good use case to use Litho? Or using a RecyclerView is enough?
Are the views are being recycled properly:
What does it mean to us is consider, creating 40-50 view per screen and as user moves out of the view, system should not mark all views for GC rather it should be inside some kind archived list and as we require it again we should be able to fetch from it.
Why do we need to that: GC is the costliest operation which would cause app rendering to be jitter, we try to minimize the GC to called at this point by not clearing the views
For this I would like to go with litho, justification is here as your requirement seems to have more of variable count of viewtypesreference
Conclusion: Litho +1, RecyclerView +0
What about the state of my views? If I use a Recycling pattern, would I be able to keep the state of each of my fields (even those off-screen) and so being able to save the form without losing data?
Saving EditText content in RecyclerView This is one the component but same logic should be appliced to checkbox or radiobutton as well. or as in state-maintenance for litho is here
Conclusion: Litho +1, RecyclerView +1 both has specific API's to achieve state maintenance
If I use a Recycling pattern to display one form, how would I handle multiple forms? Can we have nested RecyclerView? Forms need to be displayed one after another like inside a vertical RV but if forms themselves are RV, how should I handle this?
This has to be addressed with user experience plus technical capability: As per user behaviour IMHO,I discourage the nested vertical scroll however others were able to achieve it you can easily find on how to in SO. Optimal solution would be to have horizontal scroll within either Andriod's or litho's recycler view as here
NOTE: If you need to know implementation details, please raise it as separate question, I would be happy to help there
UPDATE #1:
The issue with this is that with large forms (like >20 fields), it need to inflate lot of views and the UI thread suffer a lot.
UI creation/layout has to be performed at the backend only adding to the view has to be done on UI thread. And litho does it in-built. However same can be achieved native recycler view as well but you have to move off the UI thread and post periodically to UI.
Ok, you have two separate problems here. One is overwork the UI thread, and the other is to keep the state of your anonymous views. About the first part:
1.-Litho could help you with this. But you have to move all your logic towards litho components instead of android widgets. Since I don't know your codebase, I don't know how hard this can be. A recyclerview would help with view recycling, but that only matters if you are well, using a list.
2.-It could, as long as you have a way to keep a representation of the widget's state that you can pass to the adapter and then back to the view (I'm assuming you generate all the windows by code and then have zero reference to them) and so. It sounds messy, and it is messy, so I won't try it.
3.-You can, but is messy. Best approach in this case would be having horizontal recyclerviews inside a vertical recyclerview. Nesting recyclerviews inside another recyclerview with the same direction creates funny problems, like "Why this cell is not scrolling". I would avoid using the recyclerview as a parent if the view does not need it.
Now, to the solutions:
A) UI Overloading: According to your pseudocode, you aren't inflating stuff. You are creating java objects which happens to be subclasses of View. That's good, because creating objects in a background thread is far easier than inflating (Parsing XML and use it as arguments to generate identical copies of a given resource by invoking constructors) stuff in a background thread. While a LinearLayout context constructor requires an UI thread to be executed, other things, like textviews, don't. So you can create the latter ones inside an asynctask and after you are done generating your whole hierarchy, execute the methods that need the UI thread and add the generated layout to the window. For the view classes that don't support being created as java objects asynchronously, you can have an XML file with just that component, like the linearLayout, and create then asynchronously with the support package asyncLayoutInflater. this solution can be implemented in any codebase and would allow you to make your UI generation completely asynchronous.
B)Keeping track of the view state: Again, I'm assuming your view hierarchy is anonymous. If so, what you need is to generate an interface you can use as a contract to invoke both state saving and state loading from a lifecycle aware component, like the activity. After creating such interface, subclass the widgets and create a subscription/event bus system in each widget that saves/loads the state from the widget every time is triggered. That way, each of of the components on the screen would be able to remember their state while remaining anonymous.
Just use the RecyclerView and create views on runtime (you are not inflating, you are instantiating)
Dynamically creating and adding views should not slow the UI thread considerably on mid-range devices. If it does, do investigate for bottlenecks elsewhere
You can perform a simple benchmark by adding/removing/setting text with lots of views dynamically inside a RecyclerView or even a LinearLayout hosted by a ScrollView, and you'll see it goes smooth
Use jetpack composer provided by android
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose

ScrollView vs RecyclerView for dissimilar children on Android

I have a mix of 10-15 custom views and fragments to be shown in a vertical list. I am not sure if RecyclerView has any advantage in scenarios where all views are dissimilar. RecyclerView seems to add lot of boiler-plate code, and I think the only advantage I would get is easier enter/exit animation.
My custom views/fragment also make web-service call on being created. We don't cache web-requests for business reasons. My understanding is that RecyclerView would trigger these web-service calls on each binding, resulting in redundant calls and visible latency. Comparatively ScrollView should load the views once, and it keeps them all in memory, avoiding multiple calls.
Is my understanding correct ? I need some help understanding performance implications with ScrollViews, in the given scenario.
ScrollView
With a ScrollView, all of its subviews will be created at once, regardless of visibility on screen. If using a ScrollView for your solution, you'll probably want to "listen" for when its subviews become visible to update their content, using placeholders initially. You could also build something that will fetch the content in a background thread. This may get more complex than you want very quickly.
RecyclerView
A RecyclerView provides the advantage of deferring creation of child views until they become visible automatically, and can re-use child views with common layouts.
By using different "item view types" for each of your children, you'll disable the "recycling" part of RecyclerView, but still get the benefit of deferring the creation of views until they are scrolled into view.
RecyclerViews do provide a fairly structured pattern for you to work with via the Adapter and ViewHolders. Though not personally familiar with it, RecyclerView also has a RecyclerView.ViewCacheExtension which is intended to give the developer control over caching of views.
Overall, the advantage of late binding (don't create and load views that might never be viewed) and the flexibility of the RecyclerView will probably yield good results for you.
First of all you have to decide what you are using View or Fragment or maybe both. Don't compare View with Fragment there is a common misconception about these two, they are not similar, actually a Fragment is close to an Activity in terms of architecture and implementation.
Second, can you reuse some of these View/Fragment, if yes, then RecycleView can help you a lot.
After you decided about the topics above:
My understanding is that RecyclerView would trigger these web-service
calls on each binding
No, this is not true, the binding method is called whenever a new item is displayed (reused or newly created), you can implement adapter to perform the web API only once on an item, this is your choice.
I always go for RecycleView/ListView whenever possible, it helps to reduce the memory footprint and can reduce the implementation. In some cases, where there is no huge memory usage on views and I can't reuse some of the implementation, then I go for ScrollView, but I think twice before implementing it.

Does Android Data Binding replaces findViewById?

I saw some articles when Data Binding was announced have titles like this "Time To Leave findViewById", for some reason I thought it's going to be a replacement for libs like butterknife but when I looked at it and it seemed to me that it's only links model classes to view (title -> R.id.title) so when change title in view or in code it will reflect on the other end.
Is that all to it or am I missing something else?
That is one aspect, but it isn't the biggest. You can add expressions to do XML and have the data assigned directly to the View. For example, if you have a TextView showing the first name, you might have an expression like:
<TextView android:text="#{user.firstName}" .../>
This helps eliminate the boilerplate code linking data to the UI. It is another reason not to need findViewById.
Another convenience is that you can assign event listeners to your views in the XML. It appears similar to android:onClick, though it doesn't have the performance overhead of reflection.
There are other conveniences, but the major one is the data linking to the UI.

Correct implementation of MVC for Android

Who knows about programming for iOS and data source/delegate paradigm will understand me.
The best practice for implementing custom view in iOS:
Implement MyView class inherited from UIView
MyView has dataSource field.
On drawRect: method MyView asks dataSource for items to draw.
dataSource object conforms to required protocol and implements needed methods.
It is very similar how is implemented UITableView, but I am not talking right now about cells.
Could you please let me know the best practices to implement custom view (like MyView) in Android with MVC pattern?
See MVC pattern on Android
Read all the answers to get a rounded view of android patterns as I don't find the first one very helpful.
Design decisions have been made regarding fundamental application components which prevent pure MVC being implemented, for example the use of activities which don't allow decoupling of the layers.
I find viewing android apps in a MVC way confuses matters as you end up misusing components like activities and adapters by trying to adapt them to perform a function they weren't really designed to do.
UPDATE
You need to make the question a little more specific to get a good answer, provide details of what sort of view you require (list, grid, simple) and what sort of models you are using (where are they persisted etc).
Although it's fairly subjective I have found the following when programming with Android:
Models tend to end up being unavoidably dumb (the anemic anti-pattern). This can be because in many occasions you will find the adapter is passed content to present in the view in the form of an object or collection and then operations on those objects or collections should be performed through the adapter so the adapter is aware of when they are changed and can manage the view accordingly.
The adapter can be treated as a link between model and view, a controller if you like but without many of the advantages of a pure MVC controller. I have found that customising the adapter can be effective (although you end up with 'fat controllers' if you are viewing it from an MVC perspective). Any UI input which would invoke changes to the content can then be called by adapter methods which will edit the models using add/remove for lists, or cursor operations for the database etc.
To implement a custom view in Android, you should derive from an existing View, then override the methods you need, which will often include onDraw(), onMeasure(), and probably one or more event handlers1.
To implement something in the spirit of MVC, the data that your component represents should not be in the view class itself but instead in other classes. The exact design is up to you: you can have data stored in files, in Java objects, pull it from a Content Provider2, etc.
When drawing (override onDraw()), you should look at the state of your data and draw accordingly;
When handling an event that alters the data, alter the data in the model and call invalidate() on the view to request that it be redraw to reflect the changes.

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