An Idiot’s guide to Android RecyclerView and DataBinding

In this part, we are going to hook our RecyclerView with DataBinding. Why, you may ask, because it’s AWESOME. In this we are going to show bunch of movies with their name and description.

1. Enable DataBinding in your app build.gradle file

android {
    ...
    dataBinding {
        enabled = true
    }
}

2. In your activity_main.xml define a RecyclerView tag

3. Create a Movie pojo class, We need getters function to access variable in our xml and setters are used when you want two way DataBinding.

4. Create a layout file for individual movie item, we named it item_movie.xml

5. Now comes the magic, wrap your item_movie.xml LinearLayout into <layout> component

6. Now we need our Movie pojo variable in our item_movie.xml so that we can access title and descripition directly, for that we need to provide <variable> tag inside our xml

Note: You need to provide correct path for Movie pojo in the type attribute and the name attribute that you set will be used in code to provide an instance of Movie to individual row.

7. Now you can directly access member variables of Movie pojo into xml using @{} annotation

we have replaced

- android:text="Movie name"
+ android:text="@{movie.title}"

If you are wondering we have made member variable of class Movie private and we are able to use movie.title directly, it’s because we have provided getter function for title and DataBinding is smart to translate movie.title into movie.getTitle()

8. Let’s work on adapter side now, create a class MovieAdapter which contains an inner static class MovieViewHolder that extends RecyclerView.ViewHolder

9. Now extend your MovieAdapter class to RecyclerView.Adapter<MovieAdapter.MovieViewHolder> and implement all the method by clicking on red bulb appearing on Android Studio

10. Create a constructor that will accept List<Movie> movieList which contains all the movies that we want to show.

11. Now all that is left is to inflate the layout and bind each instance of Movie to our row in onCreateViewHolder and onBindViewHolder

12. We will use Databinding in MainActivity.java also to get access to RecyclerView and set adapter. Again in your activity_main.xml enclose your code into <layout/> tag

13. Inflate activity_main.xml in MainActivity.java using databinding

14. Now let’s initialize our RecyclerView and create instance of MovieAdapter and set adapter.

Phew! that was a lot. The motive of this article was to have a handy guide to look back whenever you feel stuck. Just bookmark it to have a handy reference. This article has been shamelessly stolen from

Android Data Binding: RecyclerView

If you want to setup RecyclerView without databinding checkout:

An Idiot’s guide to Android RecyclerView Part 1

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