Working with RecyclerViews

Introduction

In this lesson, we’ll go over a very specific UI component:. the RecyclerView. A RecyclerView allows us to efficiently display large amounts of data as a grid, list, or any user-defined layout. We only need to specify the data and define the appearance of each item, and the RecyclerView library takes care of creating and displaying the elements when needed.

Define the item layout

First, let’s define a layout for the RecyclerView item. This layout file defines the appearance of each item in the list. For the purpose of the tutorial, we’ll define a simple layout with a TextView. You can define a much more complex UI based on your needs. For example, you could include an image, multiple TextView components, and a button for your item. To keep things simple, let’s just use a TextView.