Conductor

A small, yet full-featured framework that allows building View-based Android applications. Conductor provides a light-weight wrapper around standard Android Views that does just about everything you'd want:

Conductor is architecture-agnostic and does not try to force any design decisions on the developer. We here at BlueLine Labs tend to use either MVP or MVVM, but it would work equally well with standard MVC or whatever else you want to throw at it.

Installation

Conductor 4.0 is coming soon. It is already being used in production with many, many millions of users. It is, however, not guaranteed to be API stable. As such, it is being released as a preview rather than a standard release. Preview in this context is not a commentary on stability. It is considered to be up to the same quality standards as the current 3.x stable release. Changes in Conductor 4 are available in the GitHub releases. In preparation for the release of the next version, there are currently 3 installation options:

Latest Stable 3.x

def conductorVersion = '3.2.0'

implementation "com.bluelinelabs:conductor:$conductorVersion"

// AndroidX Transition change handlers:
implementation "com.bluelinelabs:conductor-androidx-transition:$conductorVersion"

// ViewPager PagerAdapter:
implementation "com.bluelinelabs:conductor-viewpager:$conductorVersion"

// ViewPager2 Adapter:
implementation "com.bluelinelabs:conductor-viewpager2:$conductorVersion"

4.0 Preview

Use 4.0.0-preview-4 as your version number in any of the dependencies above.

SNAPSHOT

Use 4.0.0-SNAPSHOT as your version number in any of the dependencies above and add the url to the snapshot repository:

allprojects {
  repositories {
    maven { url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/" }
  }
}

Components to Know

Getting Started

Minimal Activity implementation

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {

    private lateinit var router: Router

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
      super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

      setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)

      val container = findViewById<ViewGroup>(R.id.controller_container)

      router = Conductor.attachRouter(this, binding.controllerContainer, savedInstanceState)
        .setPopRootControllerMode(PopRootControllerMode.NEVER)
        .setOnBackPressedDispatcherEnabled(true)

      if (!router.hasRootController()) {
        router.setRoot(RouterTransaction.with(HomeController()))
      }
    }
}

Minimal Controller implementation

class HomeController : Controller() {

  override fun onCreateView(
    inflater: LayoutInflater,
    container: ViewGroup,
    savedViewState: Bundle?
  ): View {
    val view = inflater.inflate(R.layout.controller_home, container, false)
    view.findViewById<TextView>(R.id.tv_title).text = "Hello World"
    return view  
  }
}

Sample Project

Demo app - Shows how to use all basic and most advanced functions of Conductor.

Controller Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a Controller is significantly simpler to understand than that of a Fragment. A lifecycle diagram is shown below:

Advanced Topics

Retain View Modes

setRetainViewMode can be called on a Controller with one of two values: RELEASE_DETACH, which will release the Controller's view as soon as it is detached from the screen (saves memory), or RETAIN_DETACH, which will ensure that a Controller holds on to its view, even if it's not currently shown on the screen (good for views that are expensive to re-create).

Custom Change Handlers

ControllerChangeHandler can be subclassed in order to perform different functions when changing between two Controllers. Two convenience ControllerChangeHandler subclasses are included to cover most basic needs: AnimatorChangeHandler, which will use an Animator object to transition between two views, and TransitionChangeHandler, which will use Lollipop's Transition framework for transitioning between views.

Child Routers & Controllers

getChildRouter can be called on a Controller in order to get a nested Router into which child Controllers can be pushed. This enables creating advanced layouts, such as Master/Detail.

RxJava Lifecycle

If the AutoDispose dependency has been added, there is a ControllerScopeProvider available that can be used along with the standard AutoDispose library.

Community Projects

The community has provided several helpful modules to make developing apps with Conductor even easier. Here's a collection of helpful libraries:

• ConductorGlide - Adds Glide lifecycle support to Controllers
• ConductorDialog - Adds a helpful DialogController (a Conductor version of DialogFragment)
• Mosby-Conductor - A plugin to integrate Mosby, an MVP/MVI library

License

Copyright 2020 BlueLine Labs, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.