Kotlin Android Extensions

In this tutorial we'll walk through the steps required to use the Kotlin Android Extensions plugin, enhancing the experience of Android development.

View binding

Background

Every Android developer knows well the findViewById() function. It is, without a doubt, a source of potential bugs and nasty code which is hard to read and support. While there are several libraries available that provide solutions to this problem, those libraries require annotating fields for each exposed View.

The Kotlin Android Extensions plugin allows us to obtain the same experience we have with some of these libraries, without having to add any extra code.

In essence, this allows for the following code:

// Using R.layout.activity_main from the 'main' source set
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.*

class MyActivity : Activity() {
    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)
        
        // Instead of findViewById<TextView>(R.id.textView)
        textView.setText("Hello, world!")
    }
}

textView is an extension property for Activity, and it has the same type as declared in activity_main.xml (so it is a TextView).

Using Kotlin Android Extensions

Configuring the dependency

In this tutorial, we're going to be using Gradle but the same can be accomplished using either IntelliJ IDEA project structure or Maven. For details on setting up Gradle to work with Kotlin, see Using Gradle.

Android Extensions is a part of the Kotlin plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio. You do not need to install additional plugins.

All you need is to enable the Android Extensions Gradle plugin in your module's build.gradle file:

apply plugin: 'kotlin-android-extensions'

Enabling experimental features

Android Extensions plugin includes several experimental features:

• LayoutContainer support
• Flavor support
• Parcelable implementation generator

These features are not considered production ready yet, so you need to turn on the experimental mode in build.gradle in order to use them:

androidExtensions {
    experimental = true
}

Importing synthetic properties

It is convenient to import all widget properties for a specific layout in one go:

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.<layout>.*

Thus, if the layout filename is activity_main.xml, we'd import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.*.

If we want to call the synthetic properties on View, we should also import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.view.*.

Once we do that, we can then invoke the corresponding extensions, which are properties named after the views in the XML file. For example, for this view:

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/hello"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>

There will be a property named hello:

activity.hello.text = "Hello World!"

LayoutContainer support

Android Extensions plugin supports different kinds of containers. The most basic ones are Activity, Fragment and View, but you can turn (virtually) any class to an Android Extensions container by implementing the LayoutContainer interface, e.g.:

import kotlinx.android.extensions.LayoutContainer

class ViewHolder(override val containerView: View) : ViewHolder(containerView), LayoutContainer {
    fun setup(title: String) {
        itemTitle.text = "Hello World!"
    }
}

Note that you need to turn on the experimental flag to use LayoutContainer.

Flavor support

Android Extensions plugin supports Android flavors. Suppose you have a flavor named free in your build.gradle file:

android {
    productFlavors {
        free {
            versionName "1.0-free"
        }
    }
}

So you can import all synthetic properties for the free/res/layout/activity_free.xml layout by adding this import:

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.free.activity_free.*

In the experimental mode, you can specify any variant name (not only flavor), e.g. freeDebug or freeRelease will work as well.

View caching

Invoking findViewById() can be slow, especially in case of huge view hierarchies, so Android Extensions tries to minimize findViewById() calls by caching views in containers.

By default, Android Extensions adds a hidden cache function and a storage field to each container (Activity, Fragment, View or a LayoutContainer implementation) written in Kotlin. The method is pretty small so it does not increase the size of APK much.

In the following example, findViewById() is only invoked once:

class MyActivity : Activity()

fun MyActivity.a() { 
    textView.text = "Hidden view"
    textView.visibility = View.INVISIBLE
}

However in the following case:

fun Activity.b() { 
    textView.text = "Hidden view"
    textView.visibility = View.INVISIBLE
}

We wouldn't know if this function would be invoked on only activities from our sources or on plain Java activities also. Because of this, we don’t use caching there, even if MyActivity instance from the previous example is passed as a receiver.

Changing view caching strategy

You can change the caching strategy globally or per container. This also requires switching on the experimental mode.

Project-global caching strategy is set in the build.gradle file:

androidExtensions {
    defaultCacheImplementation = "HASH_MAP" // also SPARSE_ARRAY, NONE
}

By default, Android Extensions plugin uses HashMap as a backing storage, but you can switch to the SparseArray implementation, or just switch off caching. The latter is especially useful when you use only the Parcelable part of Android Extensions.

Also, you can annotate a container with @ContainerOptions to change its caching strategy:

import kotlinx.android.extensions.ContainerOptions

@ContainerOptions(cache = CacheImplementation.NO_CACHE)
class MyActivity : Activity()

fun MyActivity.a() { 
    // findViewById() will be called twice
    textView.text = "Hidden view"
    textView.visibility = View.INVISIBLE
}

Parcelable implementations generator

Android Extensions plugin provides Parcelable implementation generator as an experimental feature. To be able to use it, turn on the experimental flag.

How to use

Annotate the class with @Parcelize, and a Parcelable implementation will be generated automatically.

import kotlinx.android.parcel.Parcelize

@Parcelize
class User(val firstName: String, val lastName: String, val age: Int): Parcelable

@Parcelize requires all serialized properties to be declared in the primary constructor. Android Extensions will issue a warning on each property with a backing field declared in the class body. Also, @Parcelize can't be applied if some of the primary constructor parameters are not properties.

If your class requires more advanced serialization logic, you can write it inside a companion class:

@Parcelize
data class User(val firstName: String, val lastName: String, val age: Int) : Parcelable {
    private companion object : Parceler<User> {
        override fun User.write(parcel: Parcel, flags: Int) {
            // Custom write implementation
        }

        override fun create(parcel: Parcel): User {
            // Custom read implementation
        }
    }
}

Supported types

@Parcelize supports a wide range of types:

• primitive types (and their boxed versions);
• objects and enums;
• String, CharSequence;
• Exception;
• Size, SizeF, Bundle, IBinder, IInterface, FileDescriptor;
• SparseArray, SparseIntArray, SparseLongArray, SparseBooleanArray;
• all Serializable (yes, Date is supported too) and Parcelable implementations;
• collections of all supported types: List (mapped to ArrayList), Set (mapped to LinkedHashSet), Map (mapped to LinkedHashMap);
  • Also a number of concrete implementations: ArrayList, LinkedList, SortedSet, NavigableSet, HashSet, LinkedHashSet, TreeSet, SortedMap, NavigableMap, HashMap, LinkedHashMap, TreeMap, ConcurrentHashMap;
• arrays of all supported types;
• nullable versions of all supported types.

Custom Parcelers

Even if your type is not supported directly, you can write a Parceler mapping object for it.

class ExternalClass(val value: Int)

object ExternalClassParceler : Parceler<ExternalClass> {
    override fun create(parcel: Parcel) = ExternalClass(parcel.readInt())

    override fun ExternalClass.write(parcel: Parcel, flags: Int) {
        parcel.writeInt(value)
    }
}

External parcelers can be applied using @TypeParceler or @WriteWith annotations:

// Class-local parceler
@Parcelize
@TypeParceler<ExternalClass, ExternalClassParceler>()
class MyClass(val external: ExternalClass)

// Property-local parceler
@Parcelize
class MyClass(@TypeParceler<ExternalClass, ExternalClassParceler>() val external: ExternalClass)

// Type-local parceler
@Parcelize
class MyClass(val external: @WriteWith<ExternalClassParceler>() ExternalClass)