Constraint Layout: How DhiWise Speed Up Responsive UI Development?

The problem you face with the UI stability 😞😫

Android app developers are very well familiar with the traditional layout, linear layout, and relative layout, but using these layouts may bring down your app performance. 

Moreover handling complex and large layouts can be frustrating as you manually need to create some improvement in the view hierarchy with some nested views.

The solution we have to improve UI stability 😍💃

To solve the above problem, Google has introduced an android constraint layout editor at the Google I/O conference 2016. This new Layout Editor has a set of powerful tools that empower developers to create flat-UI hierarchies for the complex layout. This new layout is called Constraint Layout. 

In this article, we will discuss the following topics to get a clear idea about constraint layout, its advantages, and how we can set up constraint layout in a few steps with DhiWise.

1. About Constraint Layout
2. Pros and Cons of using Constraint Layout 
3. Setting up Constraint layout with DhiWise

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More about Constraint Layout and how it improve UI performance

With constraint layout, developers can build complex and responsive user interfaces without using nested view groups, which is otherwise not possible with the relative layout.  The view group used by constraint layout allows developers to position and size widgets in a flexible way. 

The performance comparison between Constraint Layout and Relative Layout shows the following result.

In the above performance comparison, you can see that constraint layout has 40% better performance than the traditional layout.

Further, developers can simply drag and drop view widgets from the Palette to the designer editor and create great user interfaces. Following is the list of constraint layouts currently available to use. 

• Relative positioning
• Margins
• Centering Position
• Circular Positioning
• Visibility behavior
• Dimension Constraint
• Chains
• Virtual Helper objects
• Optimizer

Thus, constraint layout helps developers to improve the performance of layout files and also provides more versatility to use layouts. 

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Pros and Cons of using Constraint Layout

Pros 👍

1. Empowers developers to build highly complex interfaces while reducing the nesting. 
2. Eliminates the issues in the Relative layout and helps to improve the app performance.
3. Provides seamless experience across a wide range of screens.
4. With constraint layout, one can control a group of widgets through a single line of code. 
5. With constraint layout, animations can be easily added to the UI components.

Cons 👎

1. Sometimes developers might feel a little overwhelmed to understand the code.
2. Results obtained can be different than what we got to see in the design editor.
3. Sometimes you need to create another layout for landscape mode to adjust the views and widgets as it may not be up to your expectations.

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Well guys, let’s find out how to set up a Constraint Layout with DhiWise in minutes✌

“DhiWise is a revolutionary platform that emphasizes developer empowerment through the technological advancement in web and mobile app development approach.”

DhiWise Android Builder simplifies app development with its powerful features one of them is  UI constraint layout. So, the developers can create large and complex UI designs with a flat view hierarchy and improve the performance of their applications. 

In the following screenshot, you can see the multiple screens that are fetched from Figma design. Here, DhiWise enables you to switch the screen view between linear layout and constraint layout using the toggle button. 

By default, the view for each screen will be in Linear layout, as shown below.

After setting the layout to constraint layout, the views will be mapped accordingly as shown in the screenshot here.  

With constraint layout, you can deal with the relative positioning of UI elements, handle dimension constraint, visibility behavior,  circular positioning, widgets, and child views of the app. 

This is how DhiWise helps you to change the layout from linear to constraint in a matter of seconds.  

Further, you can set actions and views to each screen component but we will discuss that part in our next blog.

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Bottom Line

Now you know how Constraint Layout brings the dual power of Linear layout and Relative layouts while filtering out their limitations. 

DhiWise Android builder provides you with an easy way to change the layout from liner to constraint Layout. 

It supports app development with modern technologies such as Kotlin, React, Node, Flutter, Laravel, and Swift and provides the best-in-class features to speed up the development process. 

So, what are you waiting for? Accelerate your app development with DhiWise, sign up today for free!🎁

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