How is Jetpack Navigation’s Compose support handling `AndroidView`s nested inside composable destina...

# compose

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

How is Jetpack Navigation’s Compose support handling `AndroidView`s nested inside composable destinations? I see that NavBackStackEntryProvider sets all the owner locals for the destination (ViewModelStore, Lifecycle, SavedStateRegistry, and SaveableStateRegistry), and that AndroidView manages its view’s hierarchy state, but if a view underneath an AndroidView inside a composable destination asks for the ViewTreeSavedStateRegistryOwner, for example (and same for the other 2 view tree owners), wouldn’t they skip past the compose nav destination’s owners and find the owner on the android view containing the composition with the nav host? I would expect AndroidView to set the view tree owners from the respective composition locals on its child view.

[Ian Lake]

The only things that get merged across is:
• The CompositionContext itself: https://cs.android.com/androidx/platform/frameworks/support/+/androidx-main:compose/[…]tlin/androidx/compose/ui/viewinterop/AndroidViewTest.kt;l=360
• All CompositionLocals: https://cs.android.com/androidx/platform/frameworks/support/+/androidx-main:compose/[…]tlin/androidx/compose/ui/viewinterop/AndroidViewTest.kt;l=380

[Ian Lake]

FWIW, some CompositionLocals, like LocalViewModelStoreOwner don't exist at all anywhere in the androidx.compose code base - they're completely independent things that AndroidView wouldn't ever know about

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Wouldn’t views normally get it through ViewTreeViewModelStoreOwner though? And same for LifecycleOwner and SavedStateRegistryOwner?

[Ian Lake]

I'm saying that nothing in androidx.compose knows what ViewTreeViewModelStoreOwner should be set to - the composition local is totally unknown to androidx.compose

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

So if you have a structure like this:

RootView

ComposeView1

> NavHost
> nav destination
> AndroidView
> ComposeView2

When ComposeView2 reads the 3 view tree owners, it should get the ones defined for that nav destination, right? But because the view tree owners search will only look up the view hierarchy, it will find the same ones read by ComposeView1 (i.e. the ones on RootView). So it won’t get, for example, the right lifecycle events when the destination is navigated away from.

[Ian Lake]

No, ComposeView will inherit the composition locals

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Oh, AndroidComposeView is using provideDefault isn’t it… (checks…)

[Ian Lake]

Using a composition in another composition with an AndroidView in the middle is exactly what those tests I linked to verify

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Right, i get that works for locals in general. But AndroidCompositionLocals looks like it explicitly sets LocalLifecycleOwner & LocalSavedStateRegistryOwner here – and it gets the values for those locals from the AndroidComposeView, which gets them from the view tree here, not the incoming parent composition.

[Ian Lake]

Does that happen before or after it applies every composition local from the parent composition?

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

ProvideAndroidCompositionLocals throws if the owner.viewTreeOwners is null, so it would seem like those are read before creating the child composition, and then the composition is created, and then those values are provided before composing the child’s content.

[Ian Lake]

I think if anything, it is something in Wrapper that needs to be changed: https://cs.android.com/androidx/platform/frameworks/support/+/androidx-main:compose/[…]idMain/kotlin/androidx/compose/ui/platform/Wrapper.android.kt

[Ian Lake]

As that's what knows about the parent CompositionContext, which is really what it should be using as the source of truth I would think?

[Ian Lake]

I guess the problem is then that you really don't know which to trust - the parent composition local or a call to ViewTree somewhere in the interleaving view worlds?

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Yea, provideDefault wouldn’t work here because it would ignore values set by the intermediate views if it tried to override the ones coming from the parent composition, ie basically just the opposite problem.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

I think AndroidView would need to set the view tree owners on the views it manages. That would solve two problems:

1. Any owners specified in the parent composition would be seen by the Android views hosted by that composition.
2. Any child ComposeViews inside those Android views could be reasonably sure that the owners from the view tree are not in conflict with the ones from the parent composition.
I think should be feasible for view model and lifecycle owners, but the state registry is tricky because there are already two sources of truth - LocalSavedStateRegistry and LocalSaveableStateRegistry. I guess AndroidView could just use the former for the view tree owner and assume that anyone setting one of those locals would correctly set both of them.

[Ian Lake]

No, it isn't feasible for the ViewModel owner, like I said above - the LocalViewModelStoreOwner is not visible or available to AndroidView

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Ah my bad, I missed that yesterday. So this is only a problem for lifecycle and state registry, great - even simpler.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

I tried to summarize my understanding of this thread on the issue I filed about this back in February, might make sense to move the conversation there.