Do IDE previews work in a compose multiplatform setup? I’m not having much luck with previews define...

# compose-desktop

[aidanvii]

Do IDE previews work in a compose multiplatform setup? I’m not having much luck with previews defined in shared/…/androidMain, or even the top level android module itself. The preview pane split icon just doesn’t show. Not sure if it’s a bug or if I’m doing something wrong 🤷

[Dima Avdeev]

Preview for Desktop for now works only in jvmMain source set

[aidanvii]

Any plans to add the PreviewParameterProvider API for desktop?

[Dima Avdeev]

@alexey.tsvetkov What do you think about adding PreviewParameterProvider in the future?

[aidanvii]

it’s not a big deal without it, just a bit more code to write for different permutations of state 😅

[aidanvii]

Is there any plans to allow android previews to work in the androidMain source set?

[SrSouza]

There is any talk with Google folks to bring their code update to Compose Desktop?
I don’t think our team would like to work without, it gives much faster feedback loop when building UIs.
Would be awesome to have something similar in Desktop, it would even better because the desktop is lightweight comparing to running a Emulator

[Dima Avdeev]

Android previews already work on androidMain inside AndroidStudio

[aidanvii]

ah right, seems I need to add buildFeatures { compose = true } for android to get the code/design pane split to appear

[aidanvii]

So with:

val androidMain by getting {
    dependencies {
        api(compose.preview)
        ...
    }
}

It’s able to resolve all the android preview types (Preview annotation, PreviewParameterProvider etc).

However Android Studio gives the following error when trying to render the preview:

The following classes could not be found:
- androidx.compose.ui.tooling.ComposeViewAdapter

This is a problem I’ve seen long ago with Jetpack Compose, and the solution was to add this:

debugImplementation("androidx.customview:customview-poolingcontainer:1.0.0")

But it doesn’t resolve the issue, I think it’s obsolete (for Jetpack Compose anyway). The only thing that did resolve it was to add this, which seems very very wrong 😅:

debugImplementation(platform("androidx.compose:compose-bom:2023.04.01"))
debugImplementation("androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling")

[aidanvii]

the solution was simply:

dependencies {
    debugApi(compose.uiTooling)
}

in the android block of the shared module, much less complicated than I was making it out to be 🙈