Introduction

This library is a layer upon the android platform, trying to lift out bad design design decisions, and other annoyances. including the tremendous boilerplate code that is required in android programming.

Versions and Android X

old support libs: below 0.0.20 AndroidX : 0.0.20 and above

Below version 0.0.20 is the old support libray versions, 0.0.20 and above will be using androidX Hotfixes and bug fixing will be provided for the older as well as the newer part for some time.

Why use this library?

The point about this library is that google is developing android as a platform, which means to allow developers to create everything, which does not necessarily translate to "easy to program for"

That is what this library tries to do, gap the difference between the platform and the common sense expectation about using it.

Examples

Databinding

Using androids databinding is quite boilerplate ish, and comes with quite a lot of annoying work; For example, creating a DataBind'ed activity

Vanilla

class ExampleActivity: Activity {

    private var binding: ExampleActivityBinding? = null

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?){
        binding = ExampleActivityBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)
        setContentView(binding.root)
        //use binding, which is at this point optional
        binding?.textview.text = "someExample"
    }
}

With Csense

class ExampleDatabindingActivity : BaseDatabindingActivity<ExampleActivityBinding>() {
    override fun createBinding(): InflaterFunctionSimple<ExampleActivityBinding> =
            ExampleActivityBinding::inflate

    override fun useBinding() {
        //use binding, which is not null anymore;
        binding.exampleActivityTextview.text = "example"
    }
}

Activity tasks

Launching activities

Vanilla

    startActivity(Intent(this, MainActivity::class.java))

With Csense

    startActivity(MainActivity::class)

Finishing an Activity safely (all kinds of Activity)

Vanilla

    runOnUiThread{
        finish()
    }

With Csense

    safeFinish()

Fragments

Pushing a new fragment to the current stack (inside of a FragmentActivity)

Vanilla

    val fragment: Fragment = ...
    val containerId : Int = R.id.some_container_id

    supportFragmentManager?.let{
        val transaction = beginTransaction()
        transaction.replace(containerId,fragment)
        transaction.addToBackStack("a uniq name")
        transaction.commit()
    }

With Csense

    val fragment: Fragment = ...
    val containerId : Int = R.id.some_container_id
    pushNewFragmentTo(containerId, fragment)

Performing transactions of the fragment manager

Vanilla

    //simple commit
    supportFragmentManager?.let {
        val transaction = beginTransaction()
        //do the work, and remeber to call comit
        // could span many lines.
        transaction.commit()
    }
    //commitNow
    supportFragmentManager?.let {
        val transaction = beginTransaction()
        //do the work, and remeber to call comit
        // could span many lines.
        transaction.commitNow()
    }

With Csense

    supportFragmentManager?.transactionCommit {
        //safe inlined call where commit will be called for us no matter what we do in here.
    }
    supportFragmentManager?.transactionCommitNow {
        //safe inlined call where commitNow will be called for us no matter what we do in here.
    }

Asking for permissions

(see https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting#make-the-request, changed to only ask for camera) Vanilla

    val MY_PERMISSIONS_REQUEST_CAMERA = 4567
    fun askForCamera() {
        // Here, thisActivity is the current activity
        if (ContextCompat.checkSelfPermission(thisActivity,
                Manifest.permission.Manifest.permission.CAMERA)
                != PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED) {
            // Permission is not granted
                ActivityCompat.requestPermissions(thisActivity,
                        arrayOf(Manifest.permission.CAMERA),
                        MY_PERMISSIONS_REQUEST_CAMERA)
        } else {
            // Permission has already been granted
            //use camera
        }
    }
    // ...later in the activity

    override fun onRequestPermissionsResult(requestCode: Int,
            permissions: Array<String>, grantResults: IntArray) {
        when (requestCode) {
            MY_PERMISSIONS_REQUEST_CAMERA -> {
                // If request is cancelled, the result arrays are empty.
                if ((grantResults.isNotEmpty() && grantResults[0] == PackageManager.PERMISSION_GRANTED)) {
                    //use camera
                } else {
                    //could not use camera
                }

            }
            //...
        }
    }

With Csense in BaseActivity(1)

    use(PermissionEnum.Camera, {
        //can use camera
    }, {
        //could not use camera
    })

Or more explicit

(Does not need to be a BaseActivity, as long as the PermissionHandler is setup correctly, and receives the "onRequestPermissionsResult" callback)

    PermissionEnum.Camera.use(permissionHandler, this, {
        //use camera
    }, {
        //could not use camera
    })

In the case of using kotlin coroutines / suspend

(Does not need to be a BaseActivity, as long as the PermissionHandler is setup correctly, and receives the "onRequestPermissionsResult" callback)

     PermissionEnum.Camera.useSuspend(permissionHandler, this, {
        //use camera, we are in a suspend function
     }, {
        //could not use camera, we are in a suspend function
     })

Common view operations

Making a view visible / invisible or gone

Vanilla

    val view : View = ...
    view.visibility = View.GONE
    view.visibility = View.VISIBLE
    view.visibility = View.INVISIBLE

With Csense

    val view : View = ...
    view.gone()
    view.visible()
    view.invisible()

Querying for the visibility of a view

Vanilla

    val view : View = ...
    val isGone = view.visibility == View.GONE
    val isVisible = view.visibility == View.VISIBLE
    val isInvisible = view.visibility == View.INVISIBLE

With Csense

    val view : View = ...
    val isGone = view.isGone
    val isVisible = view.isVisible
    val isInvisible = view.isInvisible

Change visibility based on boolean

Vanilla

    val view : View = ...
    val bool = ...
    if (bool) {
        view.visibility = View.VISIBLE
    } else {
        view.visibility = View.GONE
    }

With Csense

    val view : View = ...
    val bool = ...
    view.visibleOrGone(bool)

Or Just toggling it

Vanilla

    val view : View = ...
    val bool = view.visibility == View.GONE
    if (bool) {
        view.visibility = View.VISIBLE
    } else {
        view.visibility = View.GONE
    }

With Csense

    val view : View = ...
    val bool = ...
    view.toggleVisibilityGone(bool)

Making a view disabled / enabled

Vanilla

    val view : View = ...
    //enable
    view.isEnabled = true
    view.isClickable = true
    //disable
    view.isEnabled = false
    view.isClickable = false

With Csense

    val view : View = ...
    view.enable()
    view.disable()

Where even ViewGroups are handled (in Csense), where as the vanilla example does not handle ViewGroups at all.

Selection handling

whenever you want some kind of selection regarding 1 item, or you want to be able to toggle between them, then theres is the

• SingleSelectionHandler (only 1 selected at a time)
• ToggleSelectionViewHandler (every one can be selected or deselected)

Caching views

To most peoples surprise calling "setContentView" with a layout id, causes the main thread to go and read from the disk,parse and deinflate an xml layout, which takes quite a while. However there is a possible solution, which is to use the "AsyncLayoutInflater", however it does have some very weird drawbacks;

Vanilla

With Csense (inside of a BaseSplashActivity)

Logging

Commonsense ships with a very flexible, simple logging component called "L".

The extensions for views, activities ect are all using this logging, and for good reason. It supports removing all logging functions (functions that does something with the log statements) It supports customizing logging functions (say you want to send the logs to a server) It supports disabling all logging no matter what It supports a special "production" logging channel, so some logging can be done even if production apps turn off logging It does not require a tag in most cases , since the classname is already there (reduces boilerplate)

The internal library uses it.

The are a lot of extensions for using it, both from views, activities and so on. These extensions are called "logDebug", "logWarning" , "logError", "logProduction" and does not take a tag, because that is the calling objects true code name.

So for an activity this would look like

Vanilla

class MyActivity : Activity {
    fun test() {
        Log.d(TAG,"my message")
    }

    companion object {
        val TAG = "MyActivity"
    }
}

With Csense

class MyActivity : Activity {
    fun test() {
        logDebug("my message")
    }
}

Turning off logging

Vanilla

• Not supported out of the box (hacks via proguard exists but have sideeffects)

With Csense

L.isLoggingAllowed(false)

Piping Logging (to eg a server)

Vanilla

• not supported out of the box

With Csense

//add a new listener for the debug "channel"
L.debugLoggers.add{ tag: String, message:String, throwable : Throwable? -> 
    ///handling logging here.
}

Installation

The project is accessible though jcenter, so there should be a jcenter() in the repositories.

It is recommended to store the version 1 place only, such as;

buildscript {
  ext.commonsenseVersion = "0.0.19.11"
}

Then you can start importing each of the sub modules. a full list is:

    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:base:$commonsenseVersion"
    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:system:$commonsenseVersion"
    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:widgets:$commonsenseVersion"
    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:tools:$commonsenseVersion"
    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:prebuilt:$commonsenseVersion"
    //for tests
    testImplementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:test:$commonsenseVersion"

If you want to use all modules, then there is an "all" which contains all the submodules; in gradle:

    implementation "com.commonsense.android.kotlin:all:$commonsenseVersion"

You will still have to add the test manually.

The artifacts can be viewed at: https://bintray.com/tvede-oss/Commonsense-android-kotlin

More documentation

see Intro https://github.com/Tvede-dk/CommonsenseAndroidKotlin/blob/master/documentation/Intro.md