how do I listen to a mutableStateFlow object from an Activity? I only want the activity to act on it...

# compose

[oday]

how do I listen to a mutableStateFlow object from an Activity? I only want the activity to act on it if it has changed into something other than the default value

[Adam Powell]

Seems like more of an #android question

[Adam Powell]

What have you tried so far?

[oday]

compose is android

[oday]

lifecycleScope.launchWhenCreated {
            viewModel.uiState.collect {
                if (it.authenticated) {
                    setContent {
                        Home()
                    }
                } else {
                    setContent {
                        Authentication()
                    }
                }
            }
        }

[oday]

authenticated will be set to true whenever some method inside the viewmodel is done and changes it in the state object

[Adam Powell]

MutableStateFlow and Activities aren't compose 🙂

[oday]

but Compose is the one that encourages this pattern of state change

[oday]

I would just use a LiveData and observe it if it werent for my using compose

[oday]

yea i dunno honestly

[oday]

you’re probably right

[oday]

thanks anyway

[Adam Powell]

If you're using flows this looks like a case for distinctUntilChanged

[Adam Powell]

The philosophy of state that compose uses isn't particularly unique to compose; it's highly useful with things like flows

[Adam Powell]

Same story with LiveData too

[oday]

I see..yea it’s literally the same with LiveData exccept observe does what i want, seems the same concept is in distinctUntilChanged then

[oday]

so this is coroutines stuff

[oday]

which compose happens to use

[oday]

Note that any instance of StateFlow already behaves as if distinctUntilChanged operator is applied to it, so applying distinctUntilChanged to a StateFlow has no effect. See StateFlow documentation on Operator Fusion. Also, repeated application of distinctUntilChanged operator on any flow has no effect.

[Adam Powell]

Yep. But since you're only using one sub-element of the emitted object, something else about it could be different and cause it to emit from a StateFlow

[OG]

1) I'd suggest using repeatOnLifecycle when collecting flows in activities/fragments. There's several medium articles out there that also exemplify some nice wrappers around it to use to collect flows safely in views.
2) you can break out this property out of the global view state model and have it be its own flow so you only react to changes to that single property, rather then a global view state
3) if you just prefer to still emit a global view state from your VM, then you can update the collector (your activity) to something like

viewModel.uiState.map { it.authenicated }.distinctUntilChanged().collect { .... }

And if you wanted to specify some default value here and still use a State flow, then just tack on stateIn() before collect()

It seems like the logic in your VM runs once then emits result so your UI shows the appropriate UI/composable given the authentication result. If this is something you want to only execute once, then it's still part of your app/view state, you may just want to call into the VM to mark that you consumed and handled this state change.

Otherwise, it seems like how you have it written should already be fine, even if the view state was emitted several times due to other property changes but with the same authenticated value. Because compose is already smart enough to know if a property it's consuming changed or not and if needs to recalculate/redraw etc.