In iOS I\'m a big fan of deleting the storyboard and using the Cartography framework to lay everything out in code. This is stolen from Cartography\'s github:
A little late to the game, but you need to basically treat your views in a constraint layout as regular views that simply have their own LayoutParams.
In the ConstraintLayout case, the documentation is located here: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/constraint/ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams.html
This class contains the different attributes specifying how a view want to be laid out inside a ConstraintLayout. For building up constraints at run time, using ConstraintSet is recommended.
So, the recommended method is to use a ConstraintSet.
There's a nice code sample there, but the core concept is you need to create a new set (by copying/cloning/new, etc), set its properties, and then apply it to your layout.
E.g.: Suppose your layout contains a ConstraintLayout (called mConstraintLayout here) and inside it contains a view (R.id.go_button in the sample), you could do:
ConstraintSet set = new ConstraintSet();
// You may want (optional) to start with the existing constraint,
// so uncomment this.
// set.clone(mConstraintLayout);
// Resize to 100dp
set.constrainHeight(R.id.go_button, (int)(100 * density));
set.constrainWidth(R.id.go_button, (int)(100 * density));
// center horizontally in the container
set.centerHorizontally(R.id.go_button, R.id.rootLayout);
// pin to the bottom of the container
set.connect(R.id.go_button, BOTTOM, R.id.rootLayout, BOTTOM, 8);
// Apply the changes
set.applyTo(mConstraintLayout);
// this is my… (ConstraintLayout) findViewById(R.id.rootLayout);