Recomposition of multiple Composables in loop - android-jetpack-compose

I have a simple question regarding the recomposition in Jetpack compose.
I want to implement a composeable that receives a List of something (the list may vary in size, here i assume it is fixed), and create a sub-composable out of every entry.
#Composable
fun MyGameComposable(mySomethingList: List<Something>) {
for(something: Something in mySomethingList){
SubComposable(something)
}
}
I know that the composeables are composed on top of each other (and that's okay), but i want the 'top'-composable to be have a boolean flag (it has to react to user-input, the other ones shall stay dormant). I know that if the list is big in size, i should use a more 'recycable approach' - but i want to ignore that for now. Via a callback (when a certain user-input was done), I want to shift the boolean flag to the second composable (all but the second composable should stay dormant).
#Composable
fun MyGameComposable(mySomethingList: List<Something>) {
for(something: Something in mySomethingList){
SubComposable(something, isReactingToUserInput, ()->shiftReactToUserInputToNext())
}
}
Now i have three questions (the first one does not directly regard recomposition):
Where should i define the boolean 'isReactingToUserInput'? I want it to be set true for the top composable, false for any other at the beginning. As soon as the first composable triggers, the second one becomes active, then the third etc.
When shiftReactToUserInputToNext() is triggered, how does recomposition work?
Does it iterate through the whole list and update every isReactingToUserInput-value? That seems really time-consuming, assuming it has to create every sub-composable anew.
In my approach, all Composables will remain in the list (no matter what their active/dormant-status is). How could I implement that the composable that triggered shiftReactToUserInputToNext() not only sets another one 'active', but also gets removed from the list. This probably relates to question 2) : If i remove something from the list, does compose iterate over all remaining items again and has to create everything again.
The thing is: I want thisto be very responsive.That's also why the MyGameComposable receives the entire list directly. The creation of the 100 of Composables on top of each other can take some time (no problem for me), but i don't want compose to do that every time something changes.

Related

Prevent redundant operations in RxSwift

I'm starting my adventure with RxSwift, having small experience with React in js already. I think that my problem is common, but I'm not sure how to describe it in concise abstract way, so instead I will describe it on the example.
I'm building iOS app showing some charts. The part of interest consist of ChartAreaController, ChartInfoController, both embedded in ChartController. First controller is the area showing some graph(based on rx chartData property), and the second one among others will have a slider for user to restrict show x-value (rx selectedXRange property) which is restricted to be between some min and max. The min/max value is defined by the current chart data.
Behavior when slider change updates chart is defined in ChartController:
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
(...)
chartInfoController.selectedXRange.asObservable()
.subscribe(onNext: { [unowned self] selectedXRange in
(...)
let chartData = self.filterChartData(from: self.rawChartData, in: selectedXRange)
self.chartAreaController.chartData.accept(chartData)
}).disposed(by: disposeBag)
The filterChartData() method just filters out data that is not in the range, but for the sake of the argument we can assume it is very costly and I don't want it to run twice when it is not necessary.
When user changes the chart he or she wants to show, the new data arrives from server (again ChartController):
private func handleNewData(_ rawChartData: ChartData) {
self.rawChartData = rawChartData
guard let allowedXRange = rawChartData.xRange() else { return }
let selectedXRange = chartInfoController.selectedXRange.value
let newSelectedXRange = calculateSelectedXRange(currentSelectedDays: selectedDaysRange, availableDaysRange: daysRange)
let chartData = filterChartData(from: rawChartData, in: selectedXRange)
self.chartInfoController.allowedXRange = allowedXRange //this line is not crucial
self.chartInfoController.selectedXRange.accept(newSelectedXRange)
self.chartAreaController.chartData.accept(rawChartData)
}
So upon new chart data arrival it may be the case that the currently selected xRange must be trimmed because of the new min/max values of the data. So the side effect of the method will be changing the selectedXRange and in turn running the subscription I pasted earlier. So when new data arrives the chartData is updated twice and I don't want it to happen.
Of course I can comment out last line of the handleNewData() method, but I don't like it very much, since main reason for existence of the handleNewData() is to set chartData, and with the line commented out it's goal would be achieved because of the side effect of the method (which is updating the slider). Not acceptable.
To chartData I added throttle anyways, because fast moving slider will result in many updates and this solves my problem partially(chartData updated only once). But as you may remember the filterChartData() method is costly, and this part will still be running twice.
So the one question is, if my general layout of tackling the problem is OK, or should it be handled way different? At this point I came to conclusion that I'm looking for some way of temporary disabling particular subscription on selectedXRange (without damaging other subscriptions to that variable). Temporary meaning:
(...)
//disable subscription
self.chartInfoController.selectedXRange.accept(newSelectedXRange)
self.chartAreaController.chartData.accept(rawChartData)
//enable subscription
(...)
This seem legit to me, since ChartController as an owner of the subscription and changer of the values may want to disable the subscription whenever it suits him(it?).
Does RxSwift support something like this? If not, then I think I can achieve it myself e.g. via bool property in ChartController, or via adding the subscription to separate disposeBag, which I would dispose and then recreate the subscription. But if it's good thing to do? For example bool solution may be prone to be ill handled when there is some error, and dispose/recreate may be somehow costly, and it may be the case that disposal was not intended to be used like that.
Is there a better practice to handle such situations? As I said I think the problem is common so I hope there is a canonical solution to it :) Thanks for any answer, sorry for the lengthy post.
So the one question is, if my general layout of tackling the problem is OK, or should it be handled way different?
A properly written UI input element observable will only fire when the user makes a change to the UI, not when the program makes a change. For example:
textField.rx.text.orEmpty.subscribe(onNext: { print($0) }) will only print a value when the user types in the textField, not when you call textField.text = "foo" or from a binding .bind(to: textfield.rx.text).
If you wrote the ChartInfoController, I suggest you modify it to work the way the other UI elements do. If you didn't write it, submit an issue to the developer/maintainer.
Does RxSwift support something like [temporarily disabling particular subscription]?
It depends on what you mean by "temporarily disabling". It doesn't support silently unsubscribing and resubscribing but there are plenty of operators that will filter out some events they receive while passing others along. For example filter, throttle, debounce, ignoreElements... There's a lot of them that do that.
Is there a better practice to handle such situations?
Then best solution is mentioned above.
When We have multiple subscriptions to the same Observable, it will re-execute for each subscription.
To stop re-execute for each subscription. RxSwift has several operators for this: share(), replay(), replayAll(), shareReplay(), publish(), and even shareReplayLatestWhileConnected().
read more at (RxSwift: share vs replay vs shareReplay)

How to optimize performance of Results change listeners in Realm (Swift) with a deep hierarchy?

We're using Realm (Swift binding currently in version 3.12.0) from the earliest days in our project. In some early versions before 1.0 Realm provided change listeners for Results without actually giving changeSets.
We used this a lot in order to find out if a specific Results list changed.
Later the guys at Realm exchanged this API with changeSet providing methods. We had to switch and are now mistreating this API just in order to find out if anything in a specific List changed (inserts, deletions, modifications).
Together with RxSwift we wrote our own implementation of Results change listening which looks like this:
public var observable: Observable<Base> {
return Observable.create { observer in
let token = self.base.observe { changes in
if case .update = changes {
observer.onNext(self.base)
}
}
observer.onNext(self.base)
return Disposables.create(with: {
observer.onCompleted()
token.invalidate()
})
}
}
When we now want to have consecutive updates on a list we subscribe like so:
someRealm.objects(SomeObject.self).filter(<some filter>).rx.observable
.subscribe(<subscription code that gets called on every update>)
//dispose code missing
We wrote the extension on RealmCollection so that we can subscribe to List type as well.
The concept is equal to RxRealm's approach.
So now in our App we have a lot of filtered lists/results that we are subscribing to.
When data gets more and more we notice significant performance losses when it comes to seeing a change visually after writing something into the DB.
For example:
Let's say we have a Car Realm Object class with some properties and some 1-to-n and some 1-to-1 relationships. One of the properties is a Bool, namely isDriving.
Now we have a lot of cars stored in the DB and bunch of change listeners with different filters listing to changes of the cars collection (collection observers listening for changeSets in order to find out if the list was changed).
If I take one car of some list and set the property of isDriving from false to true (important: we do writes in the background) ideally the change listener fires fast and I have the nearly immediate correct response to my write on the main thread.
Added with edit on 2019-06-19:
Let's make the scenario still a little more real:
Let's change something down the hierarchy, let's say the tires manufacturer's name. Let's say a Car has a List<Tire>, a Tire has a Manufacturer and a Manufacturer has aname.
Now we're still listing toResultscollection changes with some more or less complex filters applied.
Then we're changing the name of aManufacturer` which is connected to one of the tires which are connected to one of the cars which is in that filtered list.
Can this still be fast?
Obviously when the length of results/lists where change listeners are attached to gets longer Realm's internal change listener takes longer to calculate the differences and fires later.
So after a write we see the changes - in worst case - much later.
In our case this is not acceptable. So we are thinking through different scenarios.
One scenario would be to not use .observe on lists/results anymore and switch to Realm.observe which fires every time anything did change in the realm, which is not ideal, but it is fast because the change calculation process is skipped.
My question is: What can I do to solve this whole dilemma and make our app fast again?
The crucial thing is the threading stuff. We're always writing in the background due to our design. So the writes itself should be very fast, but then that stuff needs to synchronize to the other threads where Realms are open.
In my understanding that happens after the change detection for all Results has run through, is that right?
So when I read on another thread, the data is only fresh after the thread sync, which happens after all notifications were sent out. But I am not sure currently if the sync happens before, that would be more awesome, did not test it by now.

how to track the social media icons using DTM (Dynamic tag manager)

I have the below code in my web site.
I want to track each anchor tag using DTM. I know how to track single element. Since here we have a bunch of different elements, can anyone help how to track them using DTM? I don't want to create separate rule for each element. In a single rule how can we track these elements.
Here is an example of what you can do.
For Element Tag or Selector put "a.at-share-btn" (no quotes). This will target all the relevant links first. We can look for this too in the next step, but "pre-qualifying" it with this will improve performance so that the rule is not evaluated against every single a click.
Then, under Rule Conditions, add a Criteria of type Data > Custom.
In the Custom box, add the following:
var shareType = this.getAttribute('class').match(/\bat-svc-([a-z_-]+)/i);
if (shareType&&shareType[1]) {
_satellite.setVar('shareType',shareType[1]);
return true;
}
return false;
This code looks for the class (e.g. "at-svc-facebook") and puts the last part of it (e.g. "facebook") into a data element named shareType.
Then, you can reference it using %shareType% in any of the DTM fields. Note: because this data element is made on-the-fly, it will not show up in the auto-complete when you type it out in a field.
Alternatively, in custom code boxes (e.g. if you are needing to reference it in a javascript/3rd party tag box), you can use _satellite.getVar('shareType')

Considering an element only if its a child of another element

For example :list-view and list-item
I use them as:
<list-view>
<list-item><list-item>
<list-item><list-item>
<list-item><list-item>
</list-view>
But how do i make <list-item> element valid if and only if its a child of <list-view>?
is there a formal way to do this in polymer?
to make it more clear sometimes i create polymer elements that are intended to be used inside and only inside another polymer element
So, the short answer here is no. I think as a general rule, the element shouldn't have to know anything about its parent elements. You can have a parent element that only displays <list-item> children, but does it add anything to have a <list-item> that won't appear outside of a <list-view>?
To take an example from vanilla HTML, an <option> only really makes sense inside a <select>, <optgroup> or <datalist> element, but you can put one in elsewhere and the browser doesn't complain. Likewise, if I include a <source> tag outside of a <video>, I don't see a console message (at least on Chrome and Firefox).
If you want to do something special in this case, you can check the parent node in the attached callback. Something like:
attached: function() {
if (this.parentNode.localName !== 'list-view') {
...
} else {
...
}
Of course, if you do this, and next week you come up with an awesome <grid-list-view> that could re-use your original <list-item>, you need to go back and change your list item. So I would use this pattern with caution and only if you see a tangible benefit to restricting where your component can be used.

Breeze: When child entities have been deleted by someone else, they still appear after reloading the parent

We have a breeze client solution in which we show parent entities with lists of their children. We do hard deletes on some child entities. Now when the user is the one doing the deletes, there is no problem, but when someone else does, there seems to be no way to invalidate the children already loaded in cache. We do a new query with the parent and expanding to children, but breeze attaches all the other children it has already heard of, even if the database did not return them.
My question: shouldn't breeze realize we are loading through expand and thus completely remove all children from cache before loading back the results from the db? How else can we accomplish this if that is not the case?
Thank you
Yup, that's a really good point.
Deletion is simply a horrible complication to every data management effort. This is true no matter whether you use Breeze or not. It just causes heartache up and down the line. Which is why I recommend soft deletes instead of hard deletes.
But you don't care what I think ... so I will continue.
Let me be straight about this. There is no easy way for you to implement a cache cleanup scheme properly. I'm going to describe how we might do it (with some details neglected I'm sure) and you'll see why it is difficult and, in perverse cases, fruitless.
Of course the most efficient, brute force approach is to blow away the cache before querying. You might as well not have caching if you do that but I thought I'd mention it.
The "Detached" entity problem
Before I continue, remember the technique I just mentioned and indeed all possible solutions are useless if your UI (or anything else) is holding references to the entities that you want to remove.
Oh, you'll remove them from cache alright. But whatever is holding references to them now will continue to have a reference to an entity object which is in a "Detached" state - a ghost. Making sure that doesn't happen is your responsibility; Breeze can't know and couldn't do anything about it if it did know.
Second attempt
A second, less blunt approach (suggested by Jay) is to
apply the query to the cache first
iterate over the results and for each one
detach every child entity along the "expand" paths.
detach that top level entity
Now when the query succeeds, you have a clear road for it to fill the cache.
Here is a simple example of the code as it relates to a query of TodoLists and their TodoItems:
var query = breeze.EntityQuery.from('TodoLists').expand('TodoItems');
var inCache = manager.executeQueryLocally(query);
inCache.slice().forEach(function(e) {
inCache = inCache.concat(e.TodoItems);
});
inCache.slice().forEach(function(e) {
manager.detachEntity(e);
});
There are at least four problems with this approach:
Every queried entity is a ghost. If your UI is displaying any of the queried entities, it will be displaying ghosts. This is true even when the entity was not touched on the server at all (99% of the time). Too bad. You have to repaint the entire page.
You may be able to do that. But in many respects this technique is almost as impractical as the first. It means that ever view is in a potentially invalid state after any query takes place anywhere.
Detaching an entity has side-effects. All other entities that depend on the one you detached are instantly (a) changed and (b) orphaned. There is no easy recovery from this, as explained in the "orphans" section below.
This technique wipes out all pending changes among the entities that you are querying. We'll see how to deal with that shortly.
If the query fails for some reason (lost connection?), you've got nothing to show. Unless you remember what you removed ... in which case you could put those entities back in cache if the query fails.
Why mention a technique that may have limited practical value? Because it is a step along the way to approach #3 that could work
Attempt #3 - this might actually work
The approach I'm about to describe is often referred to as "Mark and Sweep".
Run the query locally and calculate theinCache list of entities as just described. This time, do not remove those entities from cache. We WILL remove the entities that remain in this list after the query succeeds ... but not just yet.
If the query's MergeOption is "PreserveChanges" (which it is by default), remove every entity from the inCache list (not from the manager's cache!) that has pending changes. We do this because such entities must stay in cache no matter what the state of the entity on the server. That's what "PreserveChanges" means.
We could have done this in our second approach to avoid removing entities with unsaved changes.
Subscribe to the EntityManager.entityChanged event. In your handler, remove the "entity that changed" from the inCache list because the fact that this entity was returned by the query and merged into the cache tells you it still exists on the server. Here is some code for that:
var handlerId = manager.entityChanged.subscribe(trackQueryResults);
function trackQueryResults(changeArgs) {
var action = changeArgs.entityAction;
if (action === breeze.EntityAction.AttachOnQuery ||
action === breeze.EntityAction.MergeOnQuery) {
var ix = inCache.indexOf(changeArgs.entity);
if (ix > -1) {
inCache.splice(ix, 1);
}
}
}
If the query fails, forget all of this
If the query succeeds
unsubscribe: manager.entityChanged.unsubscribe(handlerId);
subscribe with orphan detection handler
var handlerId = manager.entityChanged.subscribe(orphanDetector);
function orphanDetector(changeArgs) {
var action = changeArgs.entityAction;
if (action === breeze.EntityAction.PropertyChange) {
var orphan = changeArgs.entity;
// do something about this orphan
}
}
detach every entity that remains in the inCache list.
inCache.slice().forEach(function(e) {
manager.detachEntity(e);
});
unsubscribe the orphan detection handler
Orphan Detector?
Detaching an entity can have side-effects. Suppose we have Products and every product has a Color. Some other user hates "red". She deletes some of the red products and changes the rest to "blue". Then she deletes the "red" Color.
You know nothing about this and innocently re-query the Colors. The "red" color is gone and your cleanup process detaches it from cache. Instantly every Product in cache is modified. Breeze doesn't know what the new Color should be so it sets the FK, Product.colorId, to zero for every formerly "red" product.
There is no Color with id=0 so all of these products are in an invalid state (violating referential integrity constraint). They have no Color parent. They are orphans.
Two questions: how do you know this happened to you and what do your do?
Detection
Breeze updates the affected products when you detach the "red" color.
You could listen for a PropertyChanged event raised during the detach process. That's what I did in my code sample. In theory (and I think "in fact"), the only thing that could trigger the PropertyChanged event during the detach process is the "orphan" side-effect.
What do you do?
leave the orphan in an invalid, modified state?
revert to the equally invalid former colorId for the deleted "red" color?
refresh the orphan to get its new color state (or discover that it was deleted)?
There is no good answer. You have your pick of evils with the first two options. I'd probably go with the second as it seems least disruptive. This would leave the products in "Unchanged" state, pointing to a non-existent Color.
It's not much worse then when you query for the latest products and one of them refers to a new Color ("banana") that you don't have in cache.
The "refresh" option seems technically the best. It is unwieldy. It could easily cascade into a long chain of asynchronous queries that could take a long time to finish.
The perfect solution escapes our grasp.
What about the ghosts?
Oh right ... your UI could still be displaying the (fewer) entities that you detached because you believe they were deleted on the server. You've got to remove these "ghosts" from the UI.
I'm sure you can figure out how to remove them. But you have to learn what they are first.
You could iterate over every entity that you are displaying and see if it is in a "Detached" state. YUCK!
Better I think if the cleanup mechanism published a (custom?) event with the list of entities you detached during cleanup ... and that list is inCache. Your subscriber(s) then know which entities have to be removed from the display ... and can respond appropriately.
Whew! I'm sure I've forgotten something. But now you understand the dimensions of the problem.
What about server notification?
That has real possibilities. If you can arrange for the server to notify the client when any entity has been deleted, that information can be shared across your UI and you can take steps to remove the deadwood.
It's a valid point but for now we don't ever remove entities from the local cache as a result of a query. But.. this is a reasonable request, so please add this to the breeze User Voice. https://breezejs.uservoice.com/forums/173093-breeze-feature-suggestions
In the meantime, you can always create a method that removes the related entities from the cache before the query executes and have the query (with expand) add them back.

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