Kotlin Android Extensions
If you’ve been developing Android Apps for some time, you’re probably already tired of working with findViewById in your day-to-day life to recover views. Or maybe you gave up and started using the famous Butterknife library. If that’s your case, then you’ll love Kotlin Android Extensions. Kotlin has a built-in view injection for Android, allowing to skip manual binding or need for frameworks such as ButterKnife. Some of the advantages are a nicer syntax, better static typing, and thus being less error-prone. In your project-local (not top-level) build.gradle append extensions plugin declaration below your Kotlin plugin, on top-level indentation level.
buildscript {
...
}
id : "com.android.application"
...
id: "kotlin-android"
id "kotlin-android-extensions"
...
Using Views
Assuming we have an activity with an example layout called activity_main.xml:
XML
<? xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?>
< LinearLayout
android:layout_width = "match_parent"
android:layout_height = "match_parent" >
< Button
android:id = "@+id/my_button"
android:layout_width = "wrap_content"
android:layout_height = "wrap_content"
android:text = "My button" />
</ LinearLayout >
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We can use Kotlin extensions to call the button without any additional binding like so:
Kotlin
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.my_button
class MainActivity: Activity() {
override fun onCreate(savedInstanceBundle: Bundle?) {
super .onCreate(savedInstanceBundle)
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)
my_button.setText( "Kotlin rocks!" )
}
}
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You can also import all ids appearing in layout with a * notation
// my_button can be used the same way as before
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.*
Synthetic views can’t be used outside of Activities/Fragments/Views with that layout inflated:
Kotlin
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.my_button
class NotAView {
init {
my_button.setText( "Kotlin rocks!" )
}
}
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Product flavors
Android extensions also work with multiple Android Product Flavors. For example, if we have flavors in the build.gradle like so:
android {
productFlavors {
paid {
...
}
free {
...
}
}
}
And for example, only the free flavor has a buy button:
XML
<? xml version = "1.0" encoding = "utf-8" ?>
< LinearLayout
android:layout_width = "match_parent"
android:layout_height = "match_parent" >
< Button
android:id = "@+id/buy_button"
android:layout_width = "wrap_content"
android:layout_height = "wrap_content"
android:text = "Buy full version" />
</ LinearLayout >
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We can bind to the flavor specifically:
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.free.main_activity.buy_button
Painful listener for getting noticed, when the view is completely drawn now is so simple and awesome with Kotlin’s extension
mView.afterMeasured {
// inside this block the view is completely drawn
// you can get view's height/width, it.height / it.width
}
Under the Hood
Kotlin
inline fun View.afterMeasured(crossinline f: View.() -> Unit) {
viewTreeObserver.addOnGlobalLayoutListener(object : ViewTreeObserver.OnGlobalLayoutListener {
override fun onGlobalLayout() {
if (measuredHeight > 0 && measuredWidth > 0 ) {
viewTreeObserver.removeOnGlobalLayoutListener( this )
f()
}
}
})
}
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Last Updated :
30 May, 2022
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