Is there anyway of saving a composable to a `Bitma...

# compose

[Rafs]

Is there anyway of saving a composable to a Bitmap Just like what we do with View.drawToBitmap()

[Peter Fortuin]

I have not see it yet, but you can try to use the ComposeView with your composables inside and use the drawToBitmap() on that. I would assume that would work.

[Rafs]

That only worked when I set the ComposeView as the content of my Activity/Fragment. I haven't had any success manually inflating a ComposeView in isolation

[Peter Fortuin]

Does a View.drawToBitmap() work when the View is in isolation?

[Rafs]

This error is when I try to manually inflate and layout the composable using a ComposeView

[Rafs]

@Peter Fortuin Yes it works for regular views. You just have to call layout on it

[Peter Fortuin]

Ok.

[Rafs]

@Nader Jawad Any help here?

[Nader Jawad]

View.drawToBitmap won't work for hardware accelerated canvases. Similarly compose would have similar limitations. What is the use case for drawing a composable to a Bitmap? There might be some alternatives to accomplish the same goal

[Rafs]

@Nader Jawad I'm drawing some items on a canvas and would like to save it to a bitmap

[Nader Jawad]

In this case I would recommend creating an ImageAsset and creating a Canvas with that assert to draw content into the bitmp directly

[Nader Jawad]

Some sample code would look like the following. This will create a DrawScope that you can issue the same drawing commands that would be issued from a draw modifier:

fun drawToImageAsset() {
    val density = Density(1.0f)
    val width = 100
    val height = 100
    val canvas = Canvas(ImageAsset(width, height))
    val size = Size(width.toFloat(), height.toFloat()) 
    CanvasDrawScope().draw(density, LayoutDirection.Ltr, canvas, size) {
        drawRect(Color.Red)
    }
    // Code to save ImageAsset to file
}

[Rafs]

Take something like this for instance, each shape is a separate composable which contains a Canvas wrapped inside a Box so that I can add Modifier.dragGestureFilter and Modifier.tapGestureFilter to each individual item separately.

[Nader Jawad]

We don't expose a way to get a handle to the composable itself as per the react development model, It might work to issue drawing commands directly to the backing ImageAsset and display that on screen via Image composable instead of trying to output the composable content to a bitmap

[Rafs]

Thank you for the info. I'll make the necessary adjustments.

[Nader Jawad]

We have some testing facilities to output composables to Bitmaps but they rely on APIs introduced in Android O

[Nader Jawad]

So that also might be an alternative depending on the API level you are targeting

[Rafs]

I'm playing around with graphics in compose so API levels won't matter

[Nader Jawad]

@Filip Pavlis is there a way to access the Semantics API captureToImage from outside ComposeTestRule?

[Filip Pavlis]

Nope, we didn't invest in making these APIs to work outside of the testing framework.