Has anyone found a way to force reinitiation of a ...

# android

[John]

Has anyone found a way to force reinitiation of a viewmodel?

[Stephen Edwards]

What does ‘reinitiation’ mean? What are you trying to accomplish?

[John]

Destroy the existing instance and create a new one

[John]

I’m looking for a way to destroy a viewmodel without destroying the Application

[Stephen Edwards]

what I mean is why? What would that accomplish? e.g: You need to reclaim resources? You need to observe again from a LiveData?

[John]

I need to recreate it with new arguments and clear all its values

[Stephen Edwards]

Clearing state should not require recreating it. Can you not just modify state as desired? The whole point of a ViewModel is that it can exist independently of an activity’s/fragment’s LifeCycle.

[John]

Clearing all the values would be simple yes, I’m mainly looking for how to recreate it with new arguments

[Stephen Edwards]

I see no reason for recreating a ViewModel when you can just change any of those arguments as part of it’s state. Perhaps the arguments you have on the constructor shouldn’t be provided there?

[bezrukov]

iirc there is no clear way to do this, BUT there is hack that allows you to drop an old VM - if you look at ViewModelProvider source code (you need #get(key, class) fun), it only overrides VM in store if a new class doesn't match previously created VM's class. So you can play around it - create FakeViewModel with the same key, then you will be able to recreate your VM again.

[bezrukov]

But I don't recommend doing this 🙂

[John]

Hmm I wouldn’t want to do that 🙁

[John]

But thanks for the tip

[Saulnguyen]

If you want to recreate ViewModel, don't use ViewModelProvider, just create ViewModel object and manage it by yourself. But I'm not recommend 🙂