The live literals feature and @Preview annotation ...

# compose

[Colton Idle]

The live literals feature and @Preview annotation shown at AndroidDevSummit gets me excited to use that stuff, but I basically only use composable in a separate library. Was there an issuetracker for supporting @Preview in library modules that we could star? (I tried a quick search and no luck)

[Albert Chang]

Are you talking about the preview in the IDE or the "deploy to device" feature? Preview should work out of the box in library modules and "deploy to device" works if you manually add a run configuration.

[nitrog42]

yeah actually it’s was in AS since the begin of the compose release, wasn’t it ?

[nitrog42]

I did observe live change in emulator and it’s always nice to see, but you have to change an existing value (dp, string), adding or removing any line of code will break it until next deploy

[Colton Idle]

Really? Let me try again. I swear it didn't work a few months ago.

[Colton Idle]

I must be doing something wrong...

[Colton Idle]

I'm on latest compose, latest everything really. lol

[Colton Idle]

Here is the dep I added

implementation("androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling-preview:1.1.0-beta01")

[Albert Chang]

When you see this you should click the red circle in the top right and see what the error is.
Also note that you need the latest versions of androidx.savedstate:savedstate and androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-viewmodel as dependencies. These are already transitive dependencies of androidx.activity:activity but if you module doesn't depend on androidx.activity you may need to declare these manually (debugImplementation should be enough).

[Colton Idle]

Hm. Let me give it a whirl now.

[Colton Idle]

Alright. I started fresh again. I have this

[Colton Idle]

Alt enter gives me this

[Colton Idle]

I select ui tooling prev

[Colton Idle]

It added this

[Colton Idle]

Red @Preview went away

[Colton Idle]

Sync and rebuild

[Colton Idle]

Added

implementation("androidx.activityactivity1.4.0"), rebuilt, same issue

[Albert Chang]

You need ui-tooling.
https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/CJLTWPH7S/p1630283885351200?thread_ts=1630266562.332600&cid=CJLTWPH7S

[Colton Idle]

I do have ui tooling?

[Colton Idle]

oh snap. ui-tooling and ui-tooling preview are different. shit.

[Colton Idle]

That was it. It works. Albert to the rescue... again. Cheers

[Colton Idle]

I suppose both could just be debugImplementation right?

debugImplementation("androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling-preview:1.1.0-beta01")
debugImplementation("androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling:1.1.0-beta01")

[Colton Idle]

Filed a bug. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/204502651

[Colton Idle]

Hopefully they can improve the experience. Thanks again albert

[Albert Chang]

As the message I posted above said androidx.compose.ui:ui-tooling-preview must be implementation or the compilation of release build won’t succeed.

[Colton Idle]

If anyone stumbles upon this thread. I had to add

implementation("androidx.activity:activity:1.4.0")

too. If I remove it, it stops working.

[Albert Chang]

You can make it a debugImplementation. Or alternatively:

debugImplementation("androidx.savedstate:savedstate:1.1.0")
debugImplementation("androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-viewmodel:2.4.0")

[Colton Idle]

AH okay. I guess I misunderstood. So I can have debug of activity, but ui-tooling and preview need to be implementation?

Do I have it right now?

[Albert Chang]

users now have the option to add ui-tooling-preview as

an implementation API and ui-tooling as debugImplementation

[Albert Chang]

ui-tooling depends on ui-tooling-preview so if you add ui-tooling as implementation you don’t need to explicitly declare ui-tooling-preview. However ui-tooling-preview is needed for compilation so if ui-tooling is debugImplementation you need to add ui-tooling-preview as implementation.