Hilt ViewModel in Kotlin

October 14, 2022

Hilt is one such tool that has recently gained a lot of popularity in the Android development community.

Today, we’ll be diving deep into Hilt’s ViewModel feature specifically, which can help us with the creation and management of ViewModel instances in our Android apps. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what Hilt ViewModel is, how it works, and how it can help us with our app development projects.

First off, let’s start with the basics. Hilt is a dependency injection tool for Android app development. It’s built on top of Google’s popular Dagger2 library, which is widely used for dependency injection in Android projects. Hilt takes care of much of the boilerplate code that’s required when setting up Dagger2, which makes our lives as Android developers much easier. Essentially, Hilt allows us to create cleaner, more modular code that’s easier to test and maintain.

Now, let’s talk about Hilt ViewModel specifically. ViewModel is a key component of the Android Architecture Components, which are a set of libraries that help us with Android app development. A ViewModel in Android is a class that’s designed to store and manage UI-related data, such as screen state and user input. A ViewModel instance is tied to a specific UI controller, such as an Activity or Fragment.

With Hilt, we can easily create and manage ViewModel instances in our Android projects. Hilt’s ViewModel feature works by automatically generating a ViewModelFactory that can create ViewModel instances for us. This ViewModelFactory is then used to inject ViewModel instances into our Activities or Fragments.

To use Hilt ViewModel in our Android projects, we’ll need to add the necessary dependencies to our app’s build.gradle file. Once we’ve done that, we can use the @HiltViewModel annotation to mark our ViewModel classes. This creates a binding between our ViewModel class and the ViewModelFactory that Hilt generates for us.

When we want to use a ViewModel instance in one of our Activities or Fragments, we simply add the @ViewModelInject annotation to the ViewModel property in our Activity or Fragment. This tells Hilt to inject the appropriate ViewModel instance for us.

Hilt ViewModel is a powerful tool for Android app development that can help us create cleaner, more modular code that’s easier to test and maintain. With Hilt ViewModel, we can easily create and manage ViewModel instances in our Android projects, and simplify our dependency injection setup. By using Hilt ViewModel in our projects, we can make our code more robust, more scalable, and easier to work with overall. So if you’re an Android developer looking to up your game, be sure to give Hilt ViewModel a try!


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