RecyclerView is capable of handling almost any number of different types of widgets for display on the screen, and recycling them all independently. This is an amazingly powerful and useful technique, not just for being able to display different types of data on the screen, but also to adjust the layout of the RecyclerView in a way that is mostly transparent. However, you'll need to look at how exactly you want to break the layout up.
There are generally two main reasons you will want to use different view types in a RecyclerView:
- To break up a long list of items with a divider
- As you have different types of data you want to render together
Let's start with creating and adding dividers; you can just adjust the margin of each of the widgets when the data is bound to them, but that doesn't help the user understand why the divider is there. Often, you'll want a divider to carry details of what it actually represents, such as a date label. In these cases, you need widgets to...