Kotlin's synthetic properties conflict

Question

I'm new to Kotlin. Among other very interesting things, I've found the Android extensions which, according to the documentation, should let me use activities' views without the need of findViewById.

Actually it works very well by adding just this line in my imports:

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.<layout>.*

The problem is when two different layouts contain a widget with the same id (i.e. the same name for the synthetic property),
e.g. two different TextViews with the id txtTitle. Say the first one is on an activity and the second one belongs to the layout used inside of an adapter.

When I try to call a method on the first TextView (the activity's one) I can't see the expected result, as if the call would be done on another view. As confirmation of this, when I call txtTitle.parent, I see the parent and the siblings of the other txtTitle rather than the ones expected.

Am I doing something wrong? The only ways I've found to bypass this issue is to use different names in all my layouts or continue to use findViewById, but it would be a pity to waste this language feature...

Answer 1

The kotlin documentation on imports says

If there is a name clash, we can disambiguate by using as keyword to locally rename the clashing entity

So you could try to import the layouts with different aliases:

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.<layoutActivity>.* as lActivity
import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.<layoutView>.* as lView

And use the textviews with the corresponding qualifier: lActivity.txtTitle and lView.txtTitle

Answer 2

You can try below thing for TextView having same id from different layout.

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.activity_main.text_hello as lActivity

import kotlinx.android.synthetic.main.extra_layout.text_hello as lView

use lActivity.text = "Some text" for TextView from activity_main and lView.text = "Some text" for TextView from extra_layout.