simpler-view-visibilities.md

Simpler View visibilities with KTX

Let's revisit the implementation of the showJobDetails method inside JobDetailFragment. This is what it currently looks like:

private fun showJobDetails(job: JobDetailPresenter.DetailedJob) {
    positionInfoText.text = job.positionInfo
    locationText.text = job.location

    descriptionText.text = Html.fromHtml(job.description)

    if (job.companyLogo != null) {
        companyLogoImage.visibility = View.VISIBLE
        Glide.with(companyLogoImage).load(job.companyLogo).into(companyLogoImage)
    } else {
        companyLogoImage.visibility = View.GONE
    }
}

We'll focus on the last statement here, the if that checks whether job.companyLogo contains a null value. We use these sorts of checks often for setting View visibilities, and we can do better here.

Specifically, we can use the isVisible (and isInvisible, isGone) method from the Android KTX library, another Jetpack solution. These let us to set View visibilities with Boolean values instead of having to use the View.VISIBLE and other similar constants.

In our case, we can replace the if block with this code, using isVisible:

companyLogoImage.isVisible = job.companyLogo != null
Glide.with(companyLogoImage).load(job.companyLogo).into(companyLogoImage)

This will set the visibility of companyLogoImage to View.VISIBLE if the expression is true, and to View.GONE if it's false. Simple!

As for the Glide call, which now happens whether the value of companyLogo is null or not... Glide actually doesn't mind it too much if we pass a null value to it. It will simply fail to load it silently in the background.

Continue...

There's still more to be done here.