kotlin-fun | Playing around with Kotlin and implementing interesting | Android library

I am learning Kotlin, have done apps in Java before. I now have an activity with an Toolbar, NavigationView and a FragmentView. As I understand this: Fragment Tutorial, it is enough to state the Fragment in the xml file.

I have this activity_main.xml file:

I am trying to understand codelab 6.2 Coroutines and Room in Android Kotlin Fundamentals. Class SleepTrackerViewModel includes (with comments added by me):

I am following the codelab https://developer.android.com/codelabs/kotlin-android-training-add-navigation/index.html#9, and I use the following code to wire up the drawer:

I have been following the codelabs for the Android Kotlin Fundamentals and I've been stuck for a while on this problem. As a part of this codelab, I had to build upon an Android Trivia App. The problem with this particular task is to share the point scored through an implicit intent. And the intent of this task is to introduce Safe Args, a plugin to pass data between fragments.

The problem is whenever I add the code for the plugin dependency, the Gradle Sync fails and Android Studio return an invalid type code error. I went through the logs but still can't figure out why this is happening!

Project Level build.gradle file

I want to deploy a Cloud Function with a specific IAM policy by Deployment Manager. My deployment.yml:

I am a beginner of Android development and I am trying to write a Notes demo app following the app architecture of this example by Google.

According to the example, the ViewModel should access the model defined in the domain package i.e. the ViewModel doesn't need to know what the model is like from the API or the Database. (At least that's what I understand from the tutorial)

So in my Note app, I have data class in the domain package and database package. (which are essentially the same)

I was doing this course offered by Google, https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/kotlin-android-training-data-binding-basics/index.html?index=..%2F..android-kotlin-fundamentals#2,

The particular code in github: https://github.com/google-developer-training/android-kotlin-fundamentals-apps/tree/master/AboutMeDataBinding

Here I was doing the data binding, which is shown step by step how to implement it. But at the end I was getting an error with ActivityMainBinding

I have downloaded their solution code from github which on opening with Android-studio 3.4.1 , I got the same problem.

In Main Acctivity.kt

I'm doing some codelabs of kotlin fundamentals and I don't really get in android with the ViewModel why sometimes there seems to be a need of creating it through a ViewModelFactory. Here you can see the codelab which talks about this.

They just say to perform the initialization using the factory method pattern but I don't understand the why. Why do we need to use factory pattern? Is it because we need to pass some parameter to the ViewModel? Or is it for some other reason? Is every time we need to create a ViewModelFactory just to pass parameters to the ViewModel?

I've been looking for the answer, trying to confirm whether is just to pass extra parameters or is because of any other reason but still I'm not sure and I haven't found the answer.

I was following the android lessons on codelabs and they were introducing databinding. According to the code, all i needed to do was to enable databinding within the build.gradle file as below: