So we know how Anko makes handling views and layouts easy, but Kotlin makes accessing views and getting/setting properties of views real fun. If you have tried using findViewById()
, you already know how error-prone clunky code it is. There are a lot of libraries out there that provide a solution to this, but Kotlin provides a built-in plugin for this issue. Let's understand how to use that.
I'll be using Android Studio 3 to write code. You can get started by creating a new project in Kotlin with a blank activity in Android Studio 3+, as we won't be using any code from other recipes. You also need an intermediate understanding of Android development. Ensure that you have added Anko layouts dependencies to your project (follow the recipe Setting up Anko library for Anko layouts in gradle, in this chapter).