How to animate the change of a layout manager of recycler view

Question

I am using a recycler view with 2 different layout layout manager which is LinearLayoutManager and GridLayoutManager.

I would like to animate the items when switching from one layout manager to another manager. Is there a way to achieve this effect?

The approached pops up in my head is to override the setLayoutManger method and capture the BEFORE states of the items using the fromLayoutManager and calculate the AFTER states of the items using the toLayoutManager and animate those items into place.

I have not investigate deeply into the codes, so anyone could tell me that is such approach achievable or is there better to achieved this?

Answer 1

I solved this by adding the two methods below to my adapter. I call notifyRemoveEach(), change the layout manager, and then call notifyAddEach(). The items are briefly animated out/in depending on the duration specified on your ItemAnimator.

    public void notifyRemoveEach() {
        for (int i = 0; i < items.size(); i++) {
            notifyItemRemoved(i);
        }
    }

    public void notifyAddEach() {
        for (int i = 0; i < items.size(); i++) {
            notifyItemInserted(i);
        }
    }