How to disable the generating of synthetic view properties by the Kotlin Android extensions plugin

Question

The Kotlin Android Extensions plugin generates static properties for each view with an ID from my app layout files, as it is described in the documentation.

I would like to disable this feature, because we use DataBinding instead of the Kotlin synthetic view properties, and sometimes I import them by accident; also it adds extra build overhead for something we don't use.

Disabling the Android extensions plugin is not possible, because we use the Parcelize feature which is done by the same plugin.

Answer 1

There is a features property in the androidExtensions DSL that allows you to provide a list of features to enable. Currently, there is only two available, parcelize and views. To disable synthetic view properties, add this to your build.gradle:

android {
   // ...
}

androidExtensions {
    features = ["parcelize"]
}

Source: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/6bef27e1e889b17ae84dd2ff99881727f13ac3e5/plugins/android-extensions/android-extensions-compiler/src/org/jetbrains/kotlin/android/synthetic/AndroidComponentRegistrar.kt#L57

Answer 2

Nowadays, android-extensions plugin is discontinued so the best solution will be to just remove this plugin by removing apply plugin: 'kotlin-android-extensions' from your build.gradle.

Instead of synthetics we should use ViewBinding or DataBinding.

As explained in the first link, if you're also using parcelizer, you just need to change android-extensions plugin to kotlin-parcelize and change the import statement import kotlinx.android.parcel.Parcelize for import kotlinx.parcelize.Parcelize wherever is needed.

More info to migrate from android-extensions to JetPack here.