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Section VI: Appendices

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A. Appendix A: ViewGroups / Widgets to Jetpack Compose Cheatsheet
Written by Prateek Prasad

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Since Jetpack Compose is still relatively new, you will find yourself working in hybrid codebases for a while, comprising older features built-in XML and newer ones adopting compose.

This is a reasonably standard adoption pattern for any new technology. With this in mind, before concluding the book, here’s a handy cheatsheet you can use to find the Jetpack Compose equivalent for the most common Android Views on Android.

This guide should be a quick reference whenever you build a new UI in composing or converting an existing screen to Compose.

ViewGroup and Their Equivalents

  • LinearLayout - To stack items linearly in compose, you can use a Row for laying out items horizontally or a Column for laying out items vertically.
  • FrameLayout - To stack items on top of one another, use a Box composable.
  • RelativeLayout - Relative layout lets you lay items out relative to one another. While there is no direct equivalent for a RelativeLayout in compose, you can use a combination of Row, Column and Box with the align modifiers to achieve the same result.
  • ConstraintLayout - To lay out items relative to one another based on constraints, Jetpack Compose offers a similarly named composable, ConstraintLayout.

Composables for Building Lists

An everyday use case in any app is to present data as a list. In the XML world, you would use a RecyclerView for the job but compose offers a few variations based on the orientation and arrangement.

Common View Use Cases and Their Compose Equivalents

Here’s a quick rundown of the most common views, their most common use cases in XML, and their Jetpack Compose equivalents.

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