Hello

hello, Kai!

how can I help you today?

By answering a question mayb?

I can try

I noticed that we have some reusable custom views in our app and was wondering if that is still best practice.

truly reusable ones are fine, if you need them

the biggest anti-pattern is having business logic tied up as a custom view (e.g., BillingDetailsView)

but, if you have a bit of UI that needs custom logic (e.g., text layout beyond what you can easily accomplish with TextView), that's a fine reason for a custom view

We have a view that provides a label for either a TextView or an EditText.

that's not intrinsically bad

the main reason we try to avoid custom views is that they are seriously annoying to write and maintain

custom attributes, recycling the TypedAsset thingy, no lifecycle awareness, etc.

I have already noticed the point about maintenance ;-)

What way would you go for the View I mentioned?

that is difficult to answer, as while I know its role, I do not know whether the implementation needs to be a custom view or not

in my current main customer's project, we have a BadgeView

Neither do I. I just noticed the point about the maintainability you mentioned.

in the end, it is text with a background, and in theory could be handled with just a TextView

in our case, there are just enough idiosyncrasies in the way that text needs to get rendered that we were better served creating a custom view for it

if we could have gotten away with it, some sort of BadgePresenter might have been a more maintainable solution -- hand it the TextView, and it handles any formatting beyond what we could specify in a layout

I guess I'll have to ask the original coder on why this View needs to exist.

in the end, it's Android's implementation that makes custom views the sort of thing we minimize -- other UI toolkits, including Jetpack Compose, are far friendlier about this sort of thing

I have kind of a follow up question: I am tasked in changing the script font and script color for the whole app. The custom view is giving me quite the trouble with that (besides CheckBoxes, RadioButtons and such).

I'd like to know if changing the font and color is "a good idea"/feasible and how to best go about it.

ideally, that sort of thing gets driven by style resources

so, you declare in the style "gimme this look" and have all the widgets get the look from the style

for all the framework widgets, that's not too bad, whether using style or android:textAppearance (for the case of fonts)

for custom views, if they are not subclasses of something that is style-aware (e.g., subclass of TextView), you'll have to have some code in the view itself to help with this

When you say "driven by style resources", you don't mean a Theme?

Because it sounds like I'd have to applay the style to each widget manually.

Which would be a hell of a lot of work.

sorry, I was speaking a bit more generally

and I wasn't sure what the scope was for your changes

I have read up about styles and themes and such, but I have some open questions about it and wonder what the best general approach would be.

if it is literally every widget, then a theme would be a fine choice

Our UX handed me a font and a text color and told me that is what the app should use from now on ;-)

if it is most widgets, then a theme would be a fine choice, where you use styles for the non-confirming widget

What do you mean by non-confirming widget?

sorry, that was supposed to be "non-conforming"

if the answer is not "all widgets use this font", then by definition, some widgets are not using this font -- those "some widgets" are not conforming to the font choice

Like the custom view that we use does.

well, in this case, I think you *want* it to use that font, but it isn't

Exactly. It extends "LinearLayout" btw :D

I was more referring to the case where you are using 2+ fonts across the app: one font perhaps dominant but with others used in specific areas

Oh ok. I guess we'll have only one font for the whole app (for the time being).

right, so in your case, specifying that font in a theme, and using that theme for all your activities, is a fine choice

and you just need to hammer the custom view until it honors that theme's choices

So I would handle the font-setting in the custom views source code, I guess. How would I handle things like CheckBoxes, RadioButtons and such? They don't pick up the general "android:fontFamily" and "fontFamily".

I found that they might pick up other settings, but I find that a little strange.

"They don't pick up the general "android:fontFamily" and "fontFamily"." -- they should, as they extend TextView

Thinking back, what they actually didn't pick up was the color. I am not sure about the font atm.

android:textColor should also be honored by CompoundButton, as that is handled by TextView

For some reason it isn't at several places.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I rechecked, neither color nor Font are picked up by RadioButtons. CheckBoxes pick it up.

Is it common to change the font for a whole app? Or is it rather not done?

in terms of the actual font itself, it is fairly uncommon

up until three years ago, when font resources were introduced, it was a serious pain in the posterior

it also raises challenges for internationalization (do you have all the right glyphs?)

and, it increases the app size, by however big the font resource is

(unless you are using a font provider and are downloading the font on the fly, which raises its own concerns)

but, designers love their custom fonts, and so now that it is not completely insane to implement it, I expect that it is more common than it had been

I am pondering pushing back on that request by our designers.

As we seem to have a couple of places that are troublesome for either font or color or both.

And it could be more trouble than it's worth to implement it. It would require a lot of testing too, to make sure it's picked up everywhere in the app.

I am surprised that you are having as much trouble as you are with the color

fonts are relatively new; colors have been with us in Android since the outset

I am surprised too

and I guarantee you that RadioButton honors colors from some sources, as otherwise we could not have light and dark themes

The question is which sources those are

now, for some things, due to historical Android baggage, you might need duplicate attributes in your style/theme resources

so, for example, if you were trying android:textColor, also add textColor (no XML namespace prefix), and see if you have more luck

I did that for fontFamily, but with textColor Android Studio colors it red and tells me "cannot resolve symbol"

OK, are you sure that these RadioButtons are not specifying their color multiple ways? For example, if you have android:textColor in the actual <RadioButton> XML element, that replaces what is in a theme

Actually looking that up right now, because I wasn't sure

But it's good to know that "it should work".

also, you may need to consider a StateListDrawable: https://stackoverflow.com/a/54899138/115145

As I can search in other places than I would otherwise

that's the go-to article on the prioritization system for colors for text

Oh, the CheckButtons seem to be added programmatically somehow.

ah, then you would need to tweak the Java/Kotlin that is creating them and ensure they pick up your desired color

I wonder why they are not in the layout file and where they are created.

:D

sometimes, that's done if there are a dynamic number of them

for example, the number of checkboxes is derived from a Web service response or the number of records in a database table or something

(I meant to say RadioButtons, not CheckButtons)

There seem to be several different cases for the CheckButtons.

I wish I had comments in my code, telling me why things are there and what they mean :D

But now I have a path going forward. Set the color and font in the theme and then work through all the places where it's not picked up, finding out why.

And custom views, set the color in the source code.

For CheckBoxes and RadioButtons, either set in source code or... I dunno yet.

usually, you can specify the style or theme to use in code

eh, crap, the section link didn't jump to the right spot

One thing that baffles me a bit is our CheckBoxes not picking up the text color. They seem to be ordinary, with no style applied.

are they defined in a layout resource or are they constructed programmatically?

They are in a layout resource

<CheckBox ... android:text=".." android:textSize="..." ... />

how is the layout resource used?

View v = inflater.inflate(..., container, false);

hello, sudokai! the chat is almost over -- do you have a quick question?

Hi sudokai

Kai: how are you obtaining your LayoutInflater?

if the answer is LayoutInflater.from(), try getting it from the activity by calling getLayoutInflater()

Hi

I'll come next time

It's being passed down in "onCreateView" of a Fragment

sudokai: OK, sounds good!

Kai: OK, that seems normal

I ask because a common "my theme isn't working" cause is because somebody used the wrong Context, such as for getting a LayoutInflater

Yes. "It should work" :D

you always want a LayoutInflater from the activity for UI stuff, so it will pick up that activity's theme and apply it

in your case, you should be OK on that front

Ok

any last quick questions?

OK, then, that's a wrap for today's chat

Damn :D

next one is Tuesday at 8:30am US Eastern

Thanks for the session

And have a good time

you too!