Fragments create new instances of Observers after onActivityCreated

[nexuscomputing]

First of all I want to say thanks for the three samples which enlighten working with these new components significantly, looking at the code there is a lot to learn.

After trying to create a project, making use of the new arch components, I noticed that one of my Fragments received more and more events from LiveData within the Observer code after navigating back and forth in the UI.

This happens due to the Fragment instance being retained and popped back from the stack after "back" navigation.

In these examples typically in onActivityCreated LiveData is observed and a new Observer is created. In order to solve recreating new Observers, checking if onActivityCreated has been called on the instance of Fragment before seems to be the goto solution for the moment.

@yigit how would you go about this? check if savedInstanceState is null and then create Observers? I also noticed that declaring the Observers as final fields seems to solve the issue as well, meaning that registering the same Observer instance several times seems to be fine, is this something you would recommend?

Thanks a lot and keep up the good work!
Manuel

UPDATE 12 Oct 2019

using viewLifecycleOwner as LifecycleOwner as proposed seems to solve my issue. Typically what I do now is the following:

class MainFragment : Fragment() {
// ... declare viewmodel lazy
    override fun onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState)
        viewModel.liveData.observe(viewLifecycleOwner, Observer { item ->
           // ... code that deals with item / state goes here
        })
    }
//...
}

[brenoptsouza]

Yup, same happened to me, the two best solutions came across were:

1 - Register your observers in onCreate instead of onActivityCreated. Though I imagine this may create some errors if events are received before the views are created.

2 - Create a helper method - or if you are in Kotlin land, an extension function :) - that removes any observers previously registered to your lifecycle before observing a LiveData again. And then using it instead of LiveData.observe(). My example:

inline fun <T> LiveData<T>.reobserve(owner: LifecycleOwner, crossinline func: (T?) -> (Unit)) { removeObservers(owner) observe(owner, Observer<T> { t -> func(t) }) }

I don't know if this is the best solution either.

[yigit]

This is an oversight on my end, sorry about it. As @brenoptsouza mentioned, there does not seem to be an obvious solution to this. We'll fix this, thanks.

[yigit]

btw, @@brenoptsouza about 1, great news is that it won't be a problem because LiveData callbacks are not called outside onStart-onStop so view will be ready for sure.

[TonicArtos]

The problem arises because the sample code has the fragments injected after Fragment::onCreate is called. So the viewModels can only be fetched after that in Fragment::onActivityCreated. Which causes the problem with observing live data multiple times.

My solution is to do fragment injection on the fragment pre-attached life cycle callback. As this is called multiple times by the framework, I set a flag on the Injectable interface to ensure the injection is only done once.

interface Injectable {
    var injected: Boolean
}

and the injection

fun OpticsPlannerApplication.initDagger() {
    DaggerAppComponent.builder()
            .application(this)
            .build()
            .inject(this)
    registerActivityLifecycleCallbacks {
        onActivityCreated { activity, _ -> activity.inject() }
    }
}

private fun Activity.inject() {
    if (this is HasSupportFragmentInjector) AndroidInjection.inject(this)
    if (this is FragmentActivity) registerFragmentLifeCycleCallbacks(recursive = true) {
        onFragmentPreAttached { _, fragment, _ ->
            fragment.inject()
        }
    }
}

private fun Fragment.inject() {
    if (this is Injectable && !injected) {
        AndroidSupportInjection.inject(this)
        injected = true
    }
}

[cbeyls]

Newest version of the support library (26.0.0-beta2) has FragmentLifecycleCallbacks.onFragmentPreCreated().
Once stable and released this will be the best place to inject the fragments.

[yigit]

We can move the injection to onFragmentPreAttached so we don't need beta2.
On the other hand, a part of the problem is the conflict w/ data-binding.
When initialized w/ a retained view, data binding has no way of recovering its values. This is not even feasible since every variable needs to be Parcelable for that to work. So data binding just goes and sets whatever values it has. (it could avoid setting but that would break callbacks which may require actual values)

When data binding starts supporting LiveData as input, we can start passing the ViewModel to avoid these issues.

Until then, if we start observing in onCreate, when fragment's view is recreated (when it goes into backstack and comes back), we have to update the binding from the ViewModel manually. This is necessary because LiveData will not call the observers in this case because it already delivered the last result to that observer. We may also have a mod that will always call the LiveData callback on onStart even if it has the latest value. That is actually the fundamental problem here. Lifecycles does not have a way to know the views accessed by the callback is recreated.

This is annoying yet there is no easy solution for that until data binding supports LiveData.

Btw, this is still a tricky case to handle even w/o data binding, to be able to handle callbacks that requires non-parcelable instances. (e.g. clicking on an Entity to save it, you need the Entity).

Of course, another solution is to keep the views around when onDestroyView is called but that will increase the memory consumption so not desired.

Btw, on a side note, current state does not have any efficiency problems since data binding lazily updates UI. (in some callbacks, we force it because Espresso cannot track the path data binding is using to delay view setting but that is a bug in espresso, not data binding).

tl;dr; The whole purpose of Architecture Components is to reduce the number of edge cases like these so we'll eventually solve them.

[TonicArtos]

Since you mentioned there is no easy solution, here is my solution (using Kotlin coroutines). I push values coming from LiveData into a ConflatedChannel, which only keeps the latest value. Then when the data binding has been created, I also create a consumer of the ConflatedChannel to bind the values from it. To prevent leaking on the consumer coroutine, you need to use a LifecycleObserver or one of the older life cycle callbacks.

With some extensions, this looks someting like the following.

val incomingData = ConflatedChannel<Data>()

fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    // snip
    observeNotNull(viewModel.loadData(query)) {
        incomingData.post(UI, it)
    }
}

fun onViewCreated(view: View?, savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    // snip
    launch(UI) {
        incomingData.consumeEach {
            binding.data = it
        }
    }.cancelOn(this, FragmentEvent.VIEW_DESTROYED)
}

[cbeyls]

After some thinking I realized fragments actually provide 2 distinct lifecycles:

• The lifecycle of the fragment itself
• The lifecycle of each view hierarchy.

My proposed solution is to create a fragment which allows accessing the lifecycle of the current view hierarchy in addition to its own.

/**
 * Fragment providing separate lifecycle owners for each created view hierarchy.
 * <p>
 * This is one possible way to solve issue https://github.com/googlesamples/android-architecture-components/issues/47
 *
 * @author Christophe Beyls
 */
public class ViewLifecycleFragment extends Fragment {

	static class ViewLifecycleOwner implements LifecycleOwner {
		private final LifecycleRegistry lifecycleRegistry = new LifecycleRegistry(this);

		@Override
		public LifecycleRegistry getLifecycle() {
			return lifecycleRegistry;
		}
	}

	@Nullable
	private ViewLifecycleOwner viewLifecycleOwner;

	/**
	 * @return the Lifecycle owner of the current view hierarchy,
	 * or null if there is no current view hierarchy.
	 */
	@Nullable
	public LifecycleOwner getViewLifeCycleOwner() {
		return viewLifecycleOwner;
	}

	@Override
	public void onViewCreated(View view, @Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onViewCreated(view, savedInstanceState);
		viewLifecycleOwner = new ViewLifecycleOwner();
		viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_CREATE);
	}

	@Override
	public void onStart() {
		super.onStart();
		if (viewLifecycleOwner != null) {
			viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_START);
		}
	}

	@Override
	public void onResume() {
		super.onResume();
		if (viewLifecycleOwner != null) {
			viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_RESUME);
		}
	}

	@Override
	public void onPause() {
		if (viewLifecycleOwner != null) {
			viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_PAUSE);
		}
		super.onPause();
	}

	@Override
	public void onStop() {
		if (viewLifecycleOwner != null) {
			viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_STOP);
		}
		super.onStop();
	}

	@Override
	public void onDestroyView() {
		if (viewLifecycleOwner != null) {
			viewLifecycleOwner.getLifecycle().handleLifecycleEvent(Event.ON_DESTROY);
			viewLifecycleOwner = null;
		}
		super.onDestroyView();
	}
}

It can be used to register an observer in onActivityCreated() that will be properly unregistered in onDestroyView() automatically:

@Override
public void onActivityCreated(@Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
	super.onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState);

	viewModel.getSampleData().observe(getViewLifeCycleOwner(), new Observer<String>() {
		@Override
		public void onChanged(@Nullable String result) {
			// Update views
		}
	});
}

When the fragment is detached and re-attached, the last result will be pushed to the new view hierarchy automatically as expected.

@yigit Do you think this is the right approach to solve the problem in the official library?

[thanhpd56]

@yigit is there any progress to fix this issue?

[Zhuinden]

Is this really even a bug? The lifecycle aware observers are registered until the component is destroyed. The fragment is not destroyed, only its view hierarchy is.

[cbeyls]

It's not a bug in itself, but the official samples show an incorrect use of LiveData in fragments and the documentation should inform about this confusion between Fragment lifecycle and View lifecycle. I wrote a full article about this last week.

[Zhuinden]

@cbeyls oh yeah you're right! In the BasicSample - and I messed this up in my own sample too, registering in onViewCreated (with an anonymous observer) but not unregistering in onDestroyView!

Whoops >. <