Hi guys, I have a question. Let's say I have a Vie...

# android

[Lukas Anda]

Hi guys, I have a question. Let's say I have a View Holder for RecyclerView and I have 2 layouts with the same views and same names, just different sizes of views. How can I use synthetic with kotlin ?

[bachhuberdesign]

Great question, this is one of the few edge cases where I think findViewById() would actually be a better option. Would love to get other opinions on this.

[Lukas Anda]

Maybe the creator or @jw could help us out here ? Do you know what would be cool ? If we could override those views in this style

[jw]

I've never used the synthetic properties and I find them to be the wrong solution to the larger problem

[Lukas Anda]

Okay, so how do you propose solving this case ? Dagger or is there something else ?

[jw]

Sounds like findViewById solves the problem

[Lukas Anda]

Well, okay. I thought there are other ways of solving this. But thank you for your answer

[boy]

@jw I would like to know why synthetic is a wrong way to go. I loved Butterknife, but not needing to use any annotation at all is really making my life more fun. I even have a generic ViewHolder that takes a view and I don’t have to findViewById or inject anything. It makes coding so much easier. And afaik it is just lazy-loading the views using findViewById

[boy]

You will probably make a good point that will make me stop using synthetic properties…so I migh (probably) regret this question 🤐

[jw]

Databinding has a superior approach as it generates a type per layout (including across resource configurations) with properties for all contained views. This means no need for a magic cache behind the scenes and no need for magic imports. It also optimizes the lookup requiring only a single traversal over the view tree instead of one per view. When a view is only included in one configuration but the other it's marked as nullable. When you use different types across configurations the property reflects the common supertype.

[jw]

Unfortunately Databinding also includes databinding which I don't really like.

[jw]

😀

[boy]

😆 yep, not a fan of databinding either

[boy]

It is probably more efficient, but in real case scenario, I rather have easier coding than needing to write more code (variable declarations in XML and stuff, just don’t like it)

[boy]

the performance penalty is probably not interesting

[boy]

because that is what I guess you’re pointing at, that it costs performance

[jw]

Right. Which is why i'd like the layout codegen part of databinding to be separate somehow. Because I'd rather do like

val layout = LayoutName(context)
layout.name.text = "hey"

etc.

[boy]

that would be great!

[boy]

Hope you are able to make this happen 😉