Book Image

Programming Kotlin

Book Image

Programming Kotlin

Overview of this book

Quickly learn the fundamentals of the Kotlin language and see it in action on the web. Easy to follow and covering the full set of programming features, this book will get you fluent in Kotlin for Android.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Programming Kotlin
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Late initialization


Any non-null property has to be initialized in the constructor. What if you want to inject the property value via a dependency injection and you don't want to check for null every time you access it? Or, maybe you simply set the property value in one of the methods exposed by your type. Kotlin comes with support for delayed initialization. All you have to do is use the lateinit keyword:

    class Container { 
      lateinit var delayedInitProperty: DelayedInstance 
 
      fun initProperty(instance: DelayedInstance): Unit { 
        this.delayedInitProperty = instance 
      } 
    } 
 
    class DelayedInstance (val number:Int) 
    ... 
    val container=  Container() 
    container.initProperty(DelayedInstance(10)) 
    println("with delayed initialization:Number=${container.delayedInitProperty.number}") 

There are a few restrictions when using delayed properties. Firstly, the property type cannot be a...