Android Recyclerview vs ListView with Viewholder

Question

I recently came across the android RecyclerView which was released with Android 5 0 and it seems that RecyclerView is just an encapsulated traditional ListView with the ViewHolder pattern incorporated into it  which promotes the reuse of the view  rather than creating it every single time   What are the other benefits of using RecyclerView   If both have the same effect in terms of performance  why would one prefer RecyclerView     Edit  I found that people have asked similar question and the answers are not conclusive  adding them here for record keeping   Recyclerview vs Listview  Should we use RecyclerView to replace ListView   Why doesn t RecyclerView have onItemClickListener    and How RecyclerView is different from Listview

User · Answer

Okay so little bit of digging and I found these gems from Bill Philips article on RecycleView

RecyclerView can do more than ListView, but the RecyclerView class itself has fewer responsibilities than ListView. Out of the box, RecyclerView does not:

Position items on the screen

Animate views

Handle any touch events apart from scrolling

All of this stuff was baked in to ListView, but RecyclerView uses collaborator classes to do these jobs instead.

The ViewHolders you create are beefier, too. They subclass RecyclerView.ViewHolder, which has a bunch of methods RecyclerView uses. ViewHolders know which position they are currently bound to, as well as which item ids (if you have those). In the process, ViewHolder has been knighted. It used to be ListView’s job to hold on to the whole item view, and ViewHolder only held on to little pieces of it.

Now, ViewHolder holds on to all of it in the ViewHolder.itemView field, which is assigned in ViewHolder’s constructor for you.

User · Answer

The other plus of using RecycleView is animation  it can be done in two lines of code   RecyclerView ItemAnimator itemAnimator   new DefaultItemAnimator            recyclerView setItemAnimator itemAnimator     But the widget is still raw  e g you can t create header and footer

User · Answer

RecyclerView was created as a ListView improvement  so yes  you can create an attached list with  ListView control  but using RecyclerView is easier as it    Reuses cells while scrolling up down   this is possible with implementing View Holder in the ListView adapter  but it was an optional thing  while in the RecycleView it s the default way of writing adapter  Decouples list from its container   so you can put list items easily at run time in the different containers  linearLayout  gridLayout  with setting LayoutManager          mRecyclerView    RecyclerView  findViewById R id my recycler view         mRecyclerView setLayoutManager new LinearLayoutManager this          mRecyclerView setLayoutManager new GridLayoutManager this  2       Animates common list actions   Animations are decoupled and delegated to ItemAnimator  There is more about RecyclerView  but I think these points are the main ones    So  to conclude  RecyclerView is a more flexible control for handling  list data  that follows patterns of delegation of concerns and leaves for itself only one task - recycling items

User · Answer

Reuses cells while scrolling up down - this is possible with implementing View Holder in the listView adapter  but it was an optional thing  while in the RecycleView it s the default way of writing adapter   Decouples list from its container - so you can put list items easily at run time in the different containers  linearLayout  gridLayout  with setting LayoutManager   Example   mRecyclerView    RecyclerView  findViewById R id recycler view   mRecyclerView setLayoutManager new LinearLayoutManager this      or mRecyclerView setLayoutManager new GridLayoutManager this  2    mRecyclerView setLayoutManager new GridLayoutManager this  3       Animates common list actions  Animations are decoupled and delegated to ItemAnimator    There is more about RecyclerView  but I think these points are the main ones   LayoutManager  i  LinearLayoutManager - which supports both vertical and horizontal lists   ii  StaggeredLayoutManager - which supports Pinterest like staggered lists   iii  GridLayoutManager - which supports displaying grids as seen in Gallery apps   And the best thing is that we can do all these dynamically as we want

User · Answer

I used a ListView with Glide image loader  having memory growth  Then I replaced the ListView with a RecyclerView  It is not only more difficult in coding  but also leads to a more memory usage than a ListView  At least  in my project   In another activity I used a complex list with EditText s  In some of them an input method may vary  also a TextWatcher can be applied  If I used a ViewHolder  how could I replace a TextWatcher during scrolling  So  I used a ListView without a ViewHolder  and it works

User · Answer

More from Bill Phillip s article  go read it   but i thought it was important to point out the following   In ListView  there was some ambiguity about how to handle click events  Should the individual views handle those events  or should the ListView handle them through OnItemClickListener  In RecyclerView  though  the ViewHolder is in a clear position to act as a row-level controller object that handles those kinds of details  We saw earlier that LayoutManager handled positioning views  and ItemAnimator handled animating them  ViewHolder is the last piece  it   s responsible for handling any events that occur on a specific item that RecyclerView displays

User · Answer

If you use RecycleView  first you need more efford to setup  You need to give more time to setup simple Item onclick  border  touch event and other simple thing  But end product will be perfect   So decision is yours  I suggest  if you design simple app like phonebook loading  where simple click of item is enough  you can implement listview  But if you design like social media home page with unlimited scrolling  Several different decoration between item  much control of individual item than use recycle view

[android] Android Recyclerview vs ListView with Viewholder

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