Hi I m playing around with jb compose and seem to be getting

Question

Hi I m playing around with jb compose and seem to be getting in a recomposition loop when I do my toggle dark mode from the menu bar but not when I do it from a androidx compose material Swtich in the UI I ve tried wrapping multiple things in remember but it doesn t seem to help Can someone confirm if I m doing something wrong or if this is a bug in jb compose Project is on Github and here s the composable in question <https github com pnogas TempProject blob main src main kotlin com paulnogas log analyzer WindowActionManager kt L38>

jim · Answer

You re calling `darkModeViewModel toggleDarkMode ` from within a composable function That means every time you recompose you want to flip to from dark mode which of course is going to cause a recomposition and then cause it to flip again and keep flipping forever

jim · Answer

Perhaps you wanted something like ```Button onClick= darkModeViewModel toggleDarkMode ```

Paul Nogas · Answer

right the button works fine but I want to do this from menu bar keyboard shortcut So is this a limitation from jb compose

jim · Answer

No it is not a limitation of jb compose you just haven t adopted the thinking in Compose mental model yet This is normal it usually takes 3 6 months of usage before people have the bulb ah ha zap holly shit this is good moment Until then you will struggle with it you will fight it it will frustrate you and then it will all click in your mind six months later If there was anything we could do to improve the learning curve we would it s just a different way of thinking about programming Think about how you almost certainly felt about `for` loops or `exceptions` when you were taking your very first programming class it was probably a bit mind bending to start thinking the way a computer thinks The entire Android team was fighting me for months when I first proposed Compose until it finally clicked for all of them and now they all love it You can t perform a side effect in a composable function and calling `toggleDarkMode ` is a side effect You MUST perform the side effect in an event handler callback of some sort If you want to toggle the mode from a menu bar the menu bar must have an operation that allows you to flip the toggle If you want to do it from a keyboard shortcut you must listen for the key event and flip the toggle in the key event handler But you can t call `toggleDarkMode` from the composable function because the composable function gets called every time you recompose and the toggle operation is going to trigger a recompose

Paul Nogas · Answer

So I think I understand where it all fell apart One of the other options aside from dark mode in my menu is to open a file and from <https github com JetBrains compose jb issues 176> I ended up using AppWindowAmbient current window which forced me to wrap it with Composable which then bubbled up the chain of functions I tried just using null instead of that in the swing JFileChooser and it still seems to work fine So now I could get rid of a lot of Composable annotations and clean up my architecture to keep the side effects outside of the compossibles

Paul Nogas · Answer

To be specific before I had ```JFileChooser System getProperty user home apply showOpenDialog AppWindowAmbient current window result = selectedFile ``` and now I have ```JFileChooser System getProperty user home apply showOpenDialog null result = selectedFile ```

Paul Nogas · Answer

< jim> Thanks for all the help for a newbie like me I agree the thinking in compose is a learning curve but leads to great results I m just halfway through my 3 6 month journey

Paul Nogas · Answer

Here s the diff in just in case any other reader becomes interested <https github com pnogas TempProject commit 89f1788cbb72f11d219b7a6c55418db6c81e2bcf>

TheMrCodes · Answer

I think the best way to learn the compose way of thinking is like < jim> described it multiple times in the past Composeables shout be functions that translate `Data into UI` just one Way and so if you like to trigger an Event a Callback by user interaction you have to provide it as the data or specifically as a parameter of your composable