LiveData update on object field change

Question

I\'m using Android MVVM architecture with LiveData. I have an object like this

public class User {
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;         


        

Answer 1

I don't think there is any best practice as such recommended by android for this. I would suggest you to use the approach which uses cleaner & less boilerplate code.

If you are using android data binding along with LiveData you can go with the following approach:

Your POJO object would look something like this

public class User extends BaseObservable {
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;

    @Bindable
    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
        notifyPropertyChanged(BR.firstName);
    }

    @Bindable
    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
        notifyPropertyChanged(BR.lastName);
    }
}

So you would be already having a class which notifies whenever its property changes. So you can just make use of this property change callback in your MutableLiveData to notify its observer. You can create a custom MutableLiveData for this

public class CustomMutableLiveData
        extends MutableLiveData {


    @Override
    public void setValue(T value) {
        super.setValue(value);

        //listen to property changes
        value.addOnPropertyChangedCallback(callback);
    }

    Observable.OnPropertyChangedCallback callback = new Observable.OnPropertyChangedCallback() {
        @Override
        public void onPropertyChanged(Observable sender, int propertyId) {

            //Trigger LiveData observer on change of any property in object
            setValue(getValue());

        }
    };


}

Then all you need to do is use this CustomMutableLiveData instead of MutableLiveData in your View Model

public class InfoViewModel extends AndroidViewModel {

    CustomMutableLiveData user = new CustomMutableLiveData<>();
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So by doing this you can notify both view & LiveData observer with little change to existing code. Hope it helps