After my first blog post about Fastest way for creating RecyclerView Adapter, a couple of you post a comment why I don’t use Data Binding instead of Butterknife. To be honest, I didn’t try to use it simply because I’m used to using Butterknife. I know now that I was terribly wrong, so for every developer like me, here is post to try to convince you to start using data binding.
Gradle is awesome build tool, and I’m so happy that Android Studio uses it (who ever programmed in Eclipse knows what I’m talking about). I would like to share some tips and tricks.
This is really useful with Google’s Android support library, but you will find other examples as well. First, you will need to create extra property, in my example, I name it androidSupportVersion. After that, use this property with your dependencies put a $ sign at the beginning and surround it with curly brackets.
The cool thing about this is that Android Studio will still tell you when a newer version is available.
This class is automatically generated, and here (with Gradle) you can store some global variables, for example, probably the most common use of this is to have two different API endpoints.
Similar to previous part, we can use Gradle for generating resources, for example, different name of the app.
You can use all resource types as the type for resValue: array, attr, bool, color, declare-styleable, dimen, fraction, id, integer, plurals, string, style.
We can also define something useful and use it in our app manifest.
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defaultConfig { ... manifestPlaceholders = [mapKey: "b279b6400b0bf87fba17c98249a66df0"] } |
And now we can use it in manifest like this:
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<meta-data android:name="com.google.android.maps.v2.API_KEY" android:value="${mapKey}" /> |
We can store keystore private info under gradle.properties
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keystore=/home/myname/keystore/mykey keystore_password=mypass key_alias=mykey key_password=keypass |
and it to the gradle file:
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signingConfigs { release { storeFile file("${keystore}") storePassword "${keystore_password}" keyAlias "${key_alias}" keyPassword "${key_password}" } } buildTypes { release { signingConfig signingConfigs.release .. } } |
Do you need SHA-1 certificate fingerprint? You could use a keytool, but there is a lot simpler solution. Just run gradle:
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./gradlew signingReport |
Git in Gradle
You can use Git SHA or build time inside your Gradle, for example, you can add Git SHA to your versionNameSuffix just for debug build type.
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def gitSha = 'git rev-parse --short HEAD'.execute([], project.rootDir).text.trim() def buildTime = new Date().format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'", TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC")) |
Gradle is an awesome tool for our apps, and I know that there is a lot more. Did I miss something important? Tell me in the comments below.
Android plugins are a great way to speed up your development process, so here are my favorites:
Probably everyone who uses ButterKnife library knows about this one, but still, I need to mention it. This plugin will generate all view bindings for you.
This is probably my favorite, this will create you model class from JSON string. It’s really simple to use, just copy/paste your JSON string.
Name of this plugin is really self-explanatory. You can easily forget how to write parcelable boilerplate code because this plugin will to work for you.
Basically, this is the menu with popular A commands, like uninstall, restart, clear data etc.
What plugins do you use every day? Tell me in the comments.
First of all, this is my first blog post, so here is a quick intro. I’m will try to share some interesting blog posts about cool things that I know.
We all hate (or at least I do) writing boilerplate code so I would like to share this quick way for writing RecyclerView Adapter. Before we create an adapter, we need to prepare 2 simple things; one is a class that will be our model, and second will be a layout for an item in the RecyclerView.
Now go to Android Studio > Preferences > Editor > File and code templates and click on that “+” icon for adding the new one.
You may notice that I use ButterKnife library, but you don’t have to, but you should 🙂
Now that we are all set, we need to finally create that adapter. Go to the File > New > and select your RecyclerView adapter template.
You will see a dialog like this, fill name for you adapter class, item class, and finally your item layout, click OK and… magic. The boring part of your adapter class is already written, all you have to do is make sure that you Inject your views and fill it with data (the fun part).
