My Android Studio has been having lots of trouble resolving

kotlinx.android

synthetic extensions lately... I would say that they're just unresolved 80% of the time, which makes editing very difficult. I keep looking at the bug tracker but haven't seen any issues... is this a known or common problem? Has it been fixed in a recent update to something that I'm not aware of? Currently on AS 3.1.2 w/ Kotlin plugin

1.2.41-release-Studio3.1-1

of the plugin 😕

I recall having the same issue in a project where I use them, but IIRC, the compilation went fine. FYI, I didn't report it, so you should do so on b.android.com and I stopped doing UI in xml, making a View DSL instead, so I don't need all those hacks (but needs to compile for preview): https://github.com/LouisCAD/Splitties/blob/master/viewdsl/README.md

I've had to rebuild my module from time to time

@louiscad Interesting cons and pros. Funny, that many of xml cons can be easily solved by databindings

You have to downgrade the plugin to 1.2.31

@gildor But then, I'd have to write the cons of databinding. Totally need to get up to date on this BTW, changed a lot since I tried it (and got disappointed by bugs in the early days)

I love databinding, for me looks better than dsl for views, especially with all existing problems (lack of styles and theme support), problems with preview and UI builder support. But of course there are own problem with annotation processing, guys from Android Team hope to solve it at some point and give us real incremental compilation Also, I forgot to ask them but it would be interesting experiment to generate not only bindings, but also code that can inflate views without reflection. Not sure that this worth it, but would be interesting experiment

@gildor Splitties View DSL supports themes, you can do styles programmatically, and xml styles support is planned, after I see how this works: https://github.com/airbnb/paris

I know that this is possible, but not really pleasant imo

Preview works on compiled code

I wouldn’t like to do complicated layout in code, xml still looks much better for me, especially with constraint layout editor

For me it depends. Kotlin code allows you to articulate your logic with much more freedom, allowing to make complicated things simpler in code. It has been more than 6 months that I do UIs in Kotlin rather than xml, including using ConstraintLayout, and I would not go back. Yes, I miss the layout editor, but I can define extensions that move the boilerplate away, and I can compose UIs with extension functions while keeping a flat layout hierarchy. However, if I needed the layout editor, I'd definitely use xml, but I didn't have this need yet

Layout editor for constraint layouts with instant preview is winner for me

I used to like instant preview, and I admit I kinda miss it, but not that much because Kotlin conciseness and features make me need a lot less fine tuning. I usually get what I wanted on the first try. BTW, here's a very simple

ConstraintLayout

example: https://github.com/LouisCAD/Splitties/blob/master/sample/src/main/java/com/louiscad/splittiessample/about/AboutUi.kt#L43 (yeah,

LinearLayout

would be better suited in this case, but you can see the used extensions)

Without habit to write such code looks much worse then declarative xml, but I see of course some advantages of this approach, sure, and even plan to try it with new app, but only because this app has very custom UI and a couple screens, still not sure that this is scales for big apps with a lot of layouts

In my case, it did scale to a significant app rewrite where I sometimes used two bottom sheets in the same

CoordinatorLayout

Why don't you use anko?

Because anko is much much bigger, and less easily extensible. Splitties View DSL is built with library size considerations in mind, and is ViewGroup agnostic. Adding support for one is just writing one method for layout params. I also find my approach to be simpler.

Interesting library

I plan to add support for ConstraintSet too, but I didn't feel pain using the current approach 😄

😉

Nope, it's creating it only if you specify a theme