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Android Build a Weather App Hooking Up the Model to the View Plugging in the Data

Posted by remi poolen
remi poolen
6,697 Points

Where does the weather.formatted time attribute come from?

I've watched the video's a couple of times now. but formattedTime is never declared anywhere (only a method 'getFormattedTime'). So how does the binding know what formattedTIme is?

1 Answer

Ken Alger
STAFF
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher
Ken Alger
Ken Alger
Treehouse Teacher

Remi -

This is a great question.

If we take a look inside activity_main.xml we have defined a variable, weather that accesses the CurrentWeather.java class. This is how we are able to get data from there with things like weather.temperature. The data binding library translates the Getters (getTime(), getTemperature(), etc) from the class. Since we defined our own function to return time in a specific format in getFormattedTime(), the data binding library allows us to get that information in the layout with our defined variable name and the data item we want, with dot notation. Therefore, we can access our formatted time value in the layout with weather.formattedTime.

I hope that makes sense. Please post back if it does not.

Best wishes,
Ken W. Alger