Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By : Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin - Second Edition

By: Alex Forrester, Eran Boudjnah, Alexandru Dumbravan, Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Looking to kick-start your app development journey with Android 13, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help jump-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started with building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android's RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. You'll also get to grips with testing, learning how to keep your architecture clean, understanding how to persist data, and gaining basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: Android Foundation
6
Part 2: Displaying Network Calls
12
Part 3: Testing and Code Structure
17
Part 4: Polishing and Publishing an App

Populating RecyclerView

So, we added RecyclerView to our layout. For us to benefit from RecyclerView, we need to add content to it. Let’s see how we go about doing that.

As we mentioned before, to add content to our RecyclerView, we would need to implement an adapter. An adapter binds our data to child views. In simpler terms, this means it tells RecyclerView how to plug data into views designed to present that data.

For example, let’s say we want to present a list of employees.

First, we need to design our UI model. This will be a data object holding all the information needed by our view to present a single employee. Because this is a UI model, one convention is to suffix its name with UiModel:

data class EmployeeUiModel(
    val name: String,
    val biography: String,
    val role: EmployeeRole,
    val gender: Gender,
    val imageUrl: String
)

We will...