What is the difference between textView.setText(string) and textView.text = $string

Question

Hi I am making a app with Kotlin and I found that I can both use

textView.setText(str)

and

textView.text = $str

I wanna know what I should use and the differences between them. Thank you.

Answer 1

They're the same in most cases, basically Kotlin generates a synthetic property for the class attributes based on their getter, which you can use to assign values to and get values from.

//So, for most cases
textView.setText("some value");
//Is the same as
textView.text = "some value"
//The second is simply shorter and is the 'kotlin way' of assigning values

Now, here's the catch -

In most cases, this works fine. But, as mentioned, the synthetic property is generated from the getter, if there is a setter as well, then issues arise. The reason is that the getter and the setter may have different types. For example, EditText has Editable getter, now, kotlin creates a synthetic property text of the type Editable.

editText.setText("some value"); //Works
editText.text = "some value" //Won't work, will show an error stating that expected type is Editable