# compose

I understand that animating insertions/deletions into a LazyList is still under development, but what's the recommendation for animating insertions/deletions into a regular Column or Row?

My use case is I have a list of items which I get from the ViewModel's view state, and you can add/remove these items from the UI, and the Column these items live in cannot be a LazyColumn because much higher up in the compose tree there is already a LazyColumn container (and a LazyColumn within another LazyColumn causes an error).

AnimatedVisibility has extensions on RowScope and ColumnScope that should work

Even with the ColumnScope extension, it doesn't work if my items are coming from the view state, because if an item is removed from the items list, when I iterate over the list on the next composition, I won't even reach the AnimatedVisibility that was previously wrapping that item, because it's no longer in the list I'm iterating over. So the items don't animate even with the following code:

items.forEach { item ->
    AnimatedVisibility(visible = item in items) {
        MyItemImpl(item)
    }
}

ah yeah, I see what you mean. I’m not sure on a good way to handle that case.

It seems like I need some way to memoize the item list in the composable so that it keeps items that have been deleted in the view state, until their delete animation completes. And likewise animates new items in the view state list instead of just popping them into existence

The approach for LazyColumn that is in AnimatedVisibilityLazyColumnDemo would also apply to a normal Column. And you’re on the right track, it requires some bookkeeping to keep old items around until their delete animation completes, and using MutableTransitionState to avoid the “pop in” effect.

Thanks! Looking into this now, I'm sure I'll have some follow up questions as I try to implement it

@Alex Vanyo is there any way to do this without tightly coupling your model objects to their UI animation state? That approach just won't work with my app architecture (and probably many others) in which we keep the domain models and view logic very separate

I'm trying to keep a separate MutableStateList in the view, containing the model objects + their transition state, and updating that animation-specific list in a LaunchedEffect every time the domain model list changes. But I'm having some issues

Yep, that sounds like the approach you’d want to take. You could have a List<Pair<MyItemModel, MutableTransitionState>> and then you wouldn’t need to change MyItemModel at all. There would be a bit of work to create that list, and keep it up to date as the real list updates.

Okay, I'll keep trying to debug my issues then. Thanks for confirming I'm not trying to achieve something hopeless 👍

@Alex Vanyo Are there any plans to simplify this for the developer in the future, by just using something like an .animate modifier, similar to how easy it is with SwiftUI and Flutter? I got a working implementation going without changing my models but it still feels very cumbersome to require all this extra boilerplate compared to similar UI frameworks, and I'm sure a built-in compose version could better optimize it (I'm noticing some lag when typing into the TextFields contained within my list items, causing some text input to get lost)

I have the exact same use case, a list of x items backed by some state, I want to animate items added/removed, and I cannot use LazyColumn. Do any of you know if there exists a ticket for the feature @Chuck Stein proposes? Would it be possible for me to have a look at your implementation, Chuck? Is it worth implementing it from scratch?

@dambakk here is my implementation:

And usage looks like this:

animatableListItems(items, id = { it.id }).forEach { animatableItem ->
    AnimatedVisibility(visibleState = animatableItem.transitionState) {
        MyListItemComposable(animatableItem.item)
    }
}

where items is your list of domain models representing each list item

Thanks, Chuck! That is some well written code, easy to read, works perfectly! Well done! 👏

Thank you, I'm glad it helped you out!