Observe LiveData to indicate whether or not to display TextViews in MVVM

Question

In the context of MVVM, is this an efficient way to communicate to the view that I should display some TextViews? Any advice on how I can improve it?

ViewModel code:

private var _shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent = MutableLiveData<Boolean>()
    val shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent: LiveData<Boolean>
        get() = _shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent

Activity code:

viewModel.shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent.observe(this, Observer { shouldDisplay ->
            if (!shouldDisplay) {
                binding.textviewDischargeCurrentTitle.visibility = GONE
                binding.textviewDischargeCurrent.visibility = GONE
                binding.textviewDischargeTimeTitle.visibility = GONE
                binding.textviewDischargeTime.visibility = GONE
            }
        })

Answer 1

Will asume you are using ConstraintLayout and also want to show the views (currently your code only hides the views) so I think it can be improved in 2 ways.

The first way is to use View.isVisible extension from google's lib instead of setting GONE. So you code will become like this:

viewModel.shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent.observe(this, Observer { shouldDisplay ->
    binding.textviewDischargeCurrentTitle.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
    binding.textviewDischargeCurrent.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
    binding.textviewDischargeTimeTitle.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
    binding.textviewDischargeTime.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
})

and the second way is to use Constraint Group. Add a new element in XML with all the view's ids you want to hide:

<androidx.constraintlayout.widget.Group
    android:id="@+id/textview_group"
    app:constraint_referenced_ids="textviewDischargeCurrent, textviewDischargeCurrentTitle,textviewDischargeTime,textviewDischargeTimeTitle"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>

and then in your code:

viewModel.shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent.observe(this, Observer { shouldDisplay ->
// those are no longer needed
//    binding.textviewDischargeCurrentTitle.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
//    binding.textviewDischargeCurrent.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
//    binding.textviewDischargeTimeTitle.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
//    binding.textviewDischargeTime.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
    binding.textviewGroup.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
})

Also Observer { can be removed so the final result with Constraint Group will be:

viewModel.shouldDisplayDischargeCurrent.observe(this) { shouldDisplay ->
    binding.textviewGroup.isVisible = !shouldDisplay
}

Regarding performance I could not find much about this. Maybe someone else can comment about it. Personaly I would go with Constraint Group and View.isVisible