Introduction

MVP is famous now, and a lot of developer knows about MVP. I also imported MVP to the project of our company. My colleagues are not receptive at first, but at last, they found out the beauty of MVP and were willing to use MVP. I’d really glad to see that. However, I found my colleagues are still have some confusion when they really write code about MVP. Today I will try to explain some typical questions about MVP.

Question 01: Which parts belong to presenter?

We used to write view and controller in Activity/Fragment, and have a Model layer seperated. Now taking away the Model, if the code is logic code, it belongs to Presenter. On the other hand, if the code is refreshing/creating views, it should belongs to View.

Question 02: Activity is Presenter or View?

Okay, that’s really a good question.

Most people treat Activity/Fragment as a View, and create a related Presenter with it. That’s because Activity and fragment can use “findViewById()” and “onTouchEvent()”, which seems like view code. By the way, Google’s MVP sample is working this way too.

But only Activity/Fragment has the “startActivity()” and “startActivityForResult()”, so for some people, Activity/Fragment seems like a Controller to them.

That’s all because the Activity is designed not that great. Ideally, it should not contain both the view method and the controller method. But for us, the application developer, what should we do?

It’s like “Vim & Emacs”. I really can’t say which way is great:
* Activity/Fragment is View, create a Presenter class to handle logic.
* Activity/Fragment is Controller, create a View class to create and to refresh view
You can use either solution. But don’t use both. Otherwise, the code of your project would be a chaos.

Question 03: Does Fragment needs a presenter?

That depends.

If your fragment is just like a View, which is not a full screen page, your fragment does not need a related Presenter.

If your activity has many scenarioes, and each scenario is a full screen fragment, then yes, your each fragment need different Presenter.

Question 04: Does Adapter needs a presenter?

Normally, No.

That’s because we want to put the logic of one page together, that’s easy for data access and modification. Adapter is nomarally for a AdapterView/ViewPager/RecyclerView. Just like what I said in theQuestion 03, a single View does not need a Presenter.

What if our adapter has logic to deal with? Say we have such logic in adapter:

// data : List<RawItem>
if(data.get(position).isLegal()){
    view.setText("Legal User")
} else {
    view.setText("Illgal User")
}

If possible, a better code would extract the logic to Presenter, and Adapter only show the logic

1. Presenter
NewItem newItem = new NewItem(rawItem);
if(rawItem.isLegal()){
    newItem.title="Legal User"
} else {
    newItem.title = "Ilgal user"
}

2. Adapter
// data : List<NewItem>
view.setText(data.get(position).getTitle())
This way, you logic is in the presenter. If you want to ch

This way, you logic is in the presenter. If you want to change some logic for the new requirement, you don’t have to go to find where is this logic, because I know it must in the Presenter.

Question 05: What if my presenter need Context object?

Normally, Presenter is a pure Java class. Only when Presenter is a pure Java class, we then can test the logic in JUnit.

p.s. Of course, you can unit test the Android code with the help of Robolectric. But if possible, Presenter should be a pure Java class. No one knows Robolectric will work fine every time. Actually, our project failed more than three month just because we used Robolectric, and Robolectric somehow failed locally and in Jenkins. We have to add “@Ignore” to all the Robolecric test cases.

Now back to our question, Presenter should be a pure Java class, but what if our Presenter need a Context object, let’s say, for getting a string or a dimen value?

In this case, we can just get the value in the Activity(View), and then pass it to the Presenter.

Or, our View has a method called “getString()” and Presenter call this method to get value

pbulic interface IView{
    ...
    String getString(int id);
}

Later, when you want to test Presenter, it would be easy to mock the object, since the IView in the Presenter is just an interface.

Question 06: How to reuse code in Presenters?

Easy, just like the other codes, you create a class or method to hold the duplicated code, and you can call these methods or use these classes in your Presenter

Here is an example. Two Presenter both requires a database utils class to deal with the database.

public class FilesPresenter{
    private DatabaseHelper helper;
}

public class BooksPresenter{
    private DatabaseHelper helper;
}

Question 07: How MVP make your code much more testable?

  • By sepeprating the logic and view, we now can unit test the Presenter/logic. And unit test is way faster than Instrumentation Test or Espresso, and requires no devices.

  • By using the interface, rather than the real reference of Activity or Fragment, it would be easy to mock the View object. Likewise, it would be easy to mock Presenter, since the Presenter reference in Activity/Fragment is just an interface.

p.s. Some developer may say, it would be easy to new an object, why would I need to mock. That’s because your objects are easy to initialized. Some class requires two or three other class to intiliaze, and some of these class are dependency on more classes or requires http/database connection. This makes it very hard to initilize such a class. The solution ismock. Mock can help you cut off all the dependencies, and would be easy to initilize an object.

A Typical Scenario

We now have a RecyclerView to show the data from back-end. The data from back-end is like this:

List<Country>
    Each "Country" class contains : List<Province>

Our RecyclerView need to show “Country-Province” in a grid layout.

How could we deal with this kind of scenario with MVP?

Here is what we should do:

  1. Create a UI-logic class, called “CellInfo”
  2. Createa a Presenter for our Activity. (not for Adapter)
  3. Activity call “presenter.getDataFromServer()”
  4. Presenter.getDataFromServer() will go get the data. And in the callback, we will need to convert the Listdata to List. In this case, each CellInfo is actually the value of “$country – $province”.
  5. After the conversion, presenter call “view.onRefrshList(cellInfoList)”
  6. Activity.onRefreshList(List): pass the cellInfoList to the Adapter, so the Adapter only cares about showing the View, and do not care about the logic.

Reference

Here isa really good video introducing MVP. And the speaker really lead to to the wonderland of MV*(MVP/MVVM) one step by one step. I strongly recommend you watch this video.

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