Android ViewBinding for Activity requires ViewGroup

Issue

For my Android app I was trying to implement the ViewBinding Google suggests these days:

https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/view-binding

However, there (and in all tutorials) I see this approach for the binding:

binding  ResultProfileBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)

But that doesn’t work when I apply this to my Activity like this:

binding  ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)

It requires another parameter of the parent:ViewGroup which I don’t have in my activity. I also can’t set it to null like this:

binding  ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater, null)

Since this is a NonNull parameter.

I also tried something someone suggested like this

private lateinit var binding2: ViewDataBinding
...
binding  DataBindingUtil.setContentView(this, R.layout.activity_main)

but this also failed with the error:

NoClassDefFoundError: Failed resolution of: Landroidx/databinding/DataBinderMapperImpl;

So what am I missing? How can I get the ViewBinding of my Activity?

—- EDIT —-

So to be clear.

I added android.useAndroidXtrue to the gradle.properties
The build.gradle file already contains
android { compileSdk 31
```
 buildFeatures {
     viewBinding true
 }
```
The code of the Activity looks like this:

import …databinding.ActivityMainBinding

class MainActivity: AppCompatActivity() {

private lateinit var binding: ActivityMainBinding

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
   super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
   binding  ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)
}

}

Solution

Okay, turns out the issue came from my layout.

The layout file started with a <merge tag. I assume the IDE interpreted it as a child layout for me. This didn’t seem to give errors for the normal compiling but obviously the view binding was too smart to me.

In any case, when changing it to a normal container like

<androidx.constraintlayout.widget.ConstraintLayout

it works fine. Thanks!

Answered By – Tobias Reich

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