Using findViewById is somewhat error prone due to the lack of a direct relationship between the XML description and the usage in code. View binding automatically generates code for creating that relationship.

I've sat on this for quite some time now, for two reasons:

• Ensuring type safety was the cause for larger refactoring in WidgetAdapter, which caused that class to even grow (other code paths became smaller due to less internal member variables and findViewById calls)
• Our duplicated widget list layouts (normal vs. compact) stretch the design of view binding quite a bit. I'm using the binding class for the normal layout for both cases, which has a consequence on layout compatibility: previously both layouts just needed to share view IDs, now the whole hierarchy needs to be the same (that is, the same classes, XML attributes obviously can differ). Whether that works or not is determined at runtime.

For the latter point, writing a unit test should be easy in theory (have a list of widget-layout-binding to compact-widget-layout-binding, inflate the former, bind the latter to the root view of the former), but this needs to be an instrumented Android unit test, and I'm not sure if and how this can be run in GH actions.

@mueller-ma Please let me know your thoughts on this.

TODO:

• PrimaryServerPreference currently crashes on bind