Is there a Kotlin language feature that could reduce the verbosity of accessing views from our class...

# android

[Paul Dhaliwal]

Is there a Kotlin language feature that could reduce the verbosity of accessing views from our classes with Data Binding? According to this (https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/support/+/882241) kotlinx.android.synthetic is no longer recommended. And since I use the data binding library already I figured I’d remove all those imports and just use data binding to access the views. However I end up with a lot of calls such as dataBinding.featureHostBottomNavigationViewFrame.featureHostCustomerAccountPointBalance.text = someNumber. I don’t know too much about Kotlin yet however I’m curious if there’s some way I can simplify these calls to just featureHostCustomerAccountPointBalance.text = someNumber

[Marek Osvald]

We're storing pointers exposed in the generated Binding class as private fields in `Fragment`s.

[wasyl]

If you have many calls you can wrap them in with(dataBinding) { ... }. But also data binding exposes even nested views: binding.nested works even if nested is child of child of child … of the root

[wasyl]

kotlinx.android.synthetic is no longer recommended

Last I saw discussion about this it turned out that androidx.synthetic isn’t “not recommended” overall, it’s just not recommended in the aosp repo

[Paul Dhaliwal]

Do you mean that by calling binding.nested I should from there have access to all views in the layout? I’m not seeing that field in under binding. That would be great as I could just save that value as ” val layout” for example and access all views in the layout from there, if I’m understanding correctly.

[wasyl]

I mean that the binding class should have top-level fields for all views in the layout, even nested ones. So it’s enough to store binding in the field, and then you should be able to call binding.topLevelView, binding.someChild, binding.someVeryDeeplyNestedChildView

[Paul Dhaliwal]

Ah I see. No that doesn’t work for me. I don’t see the child views when using binding, only the top level views. So I have to go binding.parentview.childview and not binding.childview. Is it possible I misconfigured something?

[wasyl]

No idea 😕 Perhaps you’re using <layout> tags? Or some older version of data binding?