Documenting Jetpack Compose is going to be a challenge. KDocs are class-centric, and Compose is more function-centric.
Suppose, for example, you want to look up the definition of LayoutWeight. You head over to
https://developer.android.com and search on it… and you seem to get no matches. It’s not even clear if any of the search results are related to Compose.
What’s going on is that
LayoutWeight is a function, defined on
RowColumnScope. RowColumnScope is part of the Compose DSL, but we are not running around and creating instances of it manually. But, since the developer.android.com search is centered around classes, if you do not know the right class, you may have difficulty finding the function.
Google’s focus seems to be on Android Studio auto-complete and related integrations, which is a reasonable solution. But, we cannot link to auto-complete in Medium posts and Slack discussions. And Android Studio’s resource requirements amount to a tax on developers, one that not everyone can pay.
Eventually, this situation will improve. Probably the online docs will become more searchable for Compose items. Third parties might create their own catalog of Compose functions with an eye towards simplifying the documentation navigation. Until then… just be prepared to hunt through the docs a bit more than you might be used to.
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