I recently started testing the MVVM pattern in android and I've spent a lot of time trying to move the seekbar functionality to my viewmodel. The problem I'm having now is that I need to update more than one value when a MutableLiveData is set, and I'm getting a circular dependency problem. I'm not even sure if this is how you're supposed to do it, but I'm overriding setValue and postValue. seekBarProgress.value cannot be set because it's not initialized.

class AddJobViewModel() : ViewModel() {
    val minPrice = 20
    val maxPrice = 1000
    val step = 10
    var description: MutableLiveData<String> = MutableLiveData("")
    var displayPrice: MutableLiveData<String> = MutableLiveData(String.format("Price: %d Kr", minPrice))
    val seekBarMax: MutableLiveData<Int> = MutableLiveData((maxPrice - minPrice) / step)

    var currentPrice: MutableLiveData<Int>
    var seekBarProgress: MutableLiveData<Int>

    init {
        currentPrice = object: MutableLiveData<Int>(minPrice) {
            override fun setValue(value: Int?) {
                if (this.value == value) {
                    return
                }
                super.setValue(value)
                displayPrice.value = String.format("Price: %d Kr", value)
                seekBarProgress.value = value!! / step - minPrice
            }

            override fun postValue(value: Int?) {
                if (this.value == value) {
                    return
                }
                super.postValue(value)
                displayPrice.postValue(String.format("Price: %d Kr", value))
                seekBarProgress.postValue(value!! / step - minPrice)
            }
        }
        seekBarProgress = object: MutableLiveData<Int>(0) {
            override fun setValue(value: Int?) {
                if (this.value == value) {
                    return
                }
                super.setValue(value)
                currentPrice.value = minPrice + value!! * step
            }

            override fun postValue(value: Int?) {
                if (this.value == value) {
                    return
                }
                super.postValue(value)
                currentPrice.postValue(minPrice + value!! * step)
            }
        }

        currentPrice.value = 200
    }
}

Looks completely wrong to me. You should assign LiveData members only once at construction time (use val not var) and modify their values whenever needed by calling setValue() or postValue().

Excellent answer, thank you. I will test it out tomorrow.

Why do you want to set the value of displayPrice at all? I would set the price, that's it. No loops.