Giphy RxJava MVP

A showcase of RxJava and Model View Presenter, plus a number of other popular libraries for android development, including AutoValue, Retrofit, Moshi, and ButterKnife. Unit tests covering any business logic and Robolectric tests verifying the ui.

The app is a simple master/detail implementation: we retrieve a list of gifs from the Giphy api and present them on the TrendingActivity in a RecyclerView. When a gif is clicked on, we load it in by itself in the GifDetailActivity.

Benefits

This setup has a number of advantages over a non-MVP app architecture

it separates our concerns
- the Presenter is view agnostic and does not care how an action was triggered, making a clear division which is easy to change
- the view which implements the View interface is very simple - the methods are usually one liners, doing something on the android Activity e.g. just setting a view's state to View.GONE - which also makes them easy to test
it allows us to place all our business logic within the Presenter object and abstracts the View for easy mocking, so we can unit test all the things, e.g:
- when we're doing a network request, does the loading indicator show when it starts, and hide when it ends?
- are we ignoring clicks on the 'refresh' button when a network call doing a refresh is already in progress?
- what happens when a network call fails?
- ... etc
support for orientation changes (e.g. device rotation) with very little effort
the power of rxjava
- Observables exposing future actions via the View interface, allowing our Presenters to be entirely stateless
- easy to do long running operations off the main thread
- in app code but also in the unit tests, e.g the excellent TestScheduler

Architecture

Packaging

The app is packaged by component/feature, under the com.emmaguy.giphymvp.feature package, to keep everything as private as possible. This means that any classes which contain logic for the trending feature is contained within feature.trending package and cannot be mistakenly used or extended elsewhere.

Each component consists of a Presenter class, a View interface which the corresponding Activity implements and a Module/Component for dependencies. The components currently map 1-1 to Activities, but could easily use custom views instead.

View interface

The View interface enables the Presenter to be pure Java and not have to know about anything android:

    interface View extends PresenterView {
            @NonNull Observable<Void> onRefreshAction();

            void setTrendingGifs(@NonNull final List<Gif> gifs);

            void showLoading();
            void hideLoading();

            void goToGif(@NonNull final Gif gif);
            ...
        }

The interface exposes:

actions that the user can perform e.g. clicking a button, swiping, etc. (these are the methods that return Observable<Object>)
- we subscribe to each of these in the Presenter's one lifecycle method, onViewAttached
- each subscription is added to a CompositeSubscription via the method unsubscribeOnViewDetach, which will unsubscribe from all subscriptions when the view is detached
- we limit what the Presenter is exposed to by using a return type of Observable<Void>, often it's enough just to know the action has happened
actions which immediately update the view with a simple operation e.g. show or hide a progress bar (method name will usually starts with show/hide), or methods which set data/state
actions that start another Activity (prefixed with goTo e.g. goToGif)

Separating loading state from data availability

When we retrieve data from the network, we have to manage a number of states - loading, idle, error cases. Coupled to this, we also have a number of combinations of data - no data, initial data and later, incremental data.

The TrendingNetworkManager separately exposes to the presenter Observables for both the loading state and the data itself. We can thus distinguish between the following states:

No data and loading => show a spinner over the entire Activity
No data and idle => show full page empty state, explaining how to get data
No data and error => show full page error message
Data and loading => show incremental spinner (e.g. swipe to refresh or perhaps a progress bar animating under the action bar)
Data and idle => display the data
Data and error => display the data that we do have, and perhaps a Toast or Snackbar detailing what went wrong with the incremental load

Whilst this could all be managed by the TrendingPresenter, it is much more easily modeled separately. Using one rx chain we could perform both the showing of progress and the data at the same time, but updating the view then becomes a side effect and it very easily gets messy, particularly when edge cases are discovered.

With them decoupled, the view expresses an action to refresh data, and the manager of that is responsible for emitting the progress state change. When the network request is complete, it can emit that it succeeded or failed alongside whatever data it managed to retrieve.

Note: the network manager could easily be extended to decide whether or not to even make the network request and retrieve from a cache instead.

Dependency Injection

This project does not use Dagger, instead it does the simple DI required manually.

We instead create simple classes suffixed with Module that contain static factory methods that construct the required dependencies, and create interfaces suffixed Component which list the injectable items for each feature.

Example Module:

class TrendingModule {
    private static TrendingPresenter presenter;

    static TrendingPresenter trendingGifsPresenter() {
        if (presenter == null) {
            presenter = new TrendingPresenter(trendingGifManager(), AndroidSchedulers.mainThread());
        }
        return presenter;
    }

    private static TrendingNetworkManager trendingGifManager() {
        return new TrendingNetworkManager(giphyApi(), Schedulers.io());
    }

    private static GiphyApi giphyApi() {
        final Moshi moshi = new Moshi.Builder().add(new AutoValueMoshiAdapterFactory()).build();

        final Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit.Builder().baseUrl("http://api.giphy.com/")
                .addCallAdapterFactory(RxJavaCallAdapterFactory.create())
                .addConverterFactory(MoshiConverterFactory.create(moshi))
                .build();

        return retrofit.create(GiphyApi.class);
    }
}

Example Component:

interface TrendingComponent extends BaseComponent {
    @NonNull TrendingPresenter getPresenter();
}

Then, when the dependencies are needed, we can create the required components using the factory methods. We abstract this into the BaseActivity, which also performs the ButterKnife binding/unbinding and Presenter lifecycle methods attaching/detaching the view.

@CallSuper @Override protected void onCreate(final Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    inject(createComponent());
    setContentView(getLayoutId());
    unbinder = ButterKnife.bind(this);
    onViewCreated(savedInstanceState);
    getPresenter().onViewAttached(getPresenterView());
}

We separate the createComponent and inject steps as an easy way to support orientation change - the first time we call both create and inject, any subsequent times we need to inject we can just call inject and we can reuse the classes - which means we have an in memory cache of data from our network requests (held in the Presenter) for free.

License

Copyright 2016 Emma Guy

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.