ComposeModel

This is a proof-of-concept for a compiler plugin that generates models from interfaces describing their public API, where the model business logic is implemented as a composable function.

Usage

Defining your model API

@ComposeModel
interface TodoListModel {
  // Data
  val todos: List<TodoModel> = emptyList()
  val completedTodos: List<TodoModel> = emptyList()

  // Event handlers
  fun onTodoAdded(todo: TodoModel)
  fun onTodoCompleted(todo: TodoModel)
}

This interface defines a model for a todo list. We can write a composable function to render the list, but that's left as an exercise for the reader. What this library does is generate some code to help you implement the business logic for this model using Compose.

In other words, the model interface defines both the model's public API, and a DSL for implementing the model.

Defining your model behavior

Here's an implementation:

@Composable fun TodoListModel(): TodoListModel = rememberTodoListModel {
  onTodoAdded { todo ->
    todos += todo
  }
  onTodoCompleted { todone ->
    require(todone in todos) { "Invalid todo: $todone" }
    todos -= todone
    completedTodos += todone
  }
}

rememberTodoListModel is generated for you. The code inside the lambda gets a mutable version of TodoListModel – it can write to the properties, and when it calls the event handlers, it actually passes lambdas that handle the events. The lambda is a composable function, and you can do stuff like create private state with remember and rememberSaveable, launch coroutines with LaunchedEffect, etc. You can read CompositionLocals, but all the usual warnings about that apply.

Let's demonstrate private state by adding a timer:

@ComposeModel
interface TodoListModel {
  // Data
  // …

  val timer: String

  // …
}

Note that the timer property doesn't have a default value, so we'll have to specify it explicitly.

@Composable fun TodoListModel(): TodoListModel = rememberTodoListModel(
  // When the function is re-generated after the above change, this parameter will be required,
  // and the code won't compile until we specify it.
  timer = Duration.ZERO.toString()
) {
  // Run the timer loop in a coroutine for as long as the model is composed.
  LaunchedEffect(Unit) {
    val startTime = System.currentTimeNanos()
    while(true) {
      delay(1000)
      timer = (System.currentTimeNanos() - startTime).nanoseconds.toString()
    }
  }

  // …
}

You could even emit things (e.g. UI composables), because Compose doesn't provide any APIs for stopping you, but that's strongly discouraged. The model composable should only be responsible for the model's business logic – UI should be defined separately. The behavior is also undefined – models don't expect their children to emit UI, so there's no meaningful layout context.

The generated rememberTodoListModel function and the builder interface are both internal, so they don't pollute your module's public API.

Persisting your model

If you were to run this app, you'd find it automatically saves and restores the models on config change. By default, rememberTodoListModel will store your model in the UiSavedStateRegistry. Only the properties are stored, and they must all be auto-saveable (in the same sense as the default autoSaver() value used by rememberSaveable). You can turn off this behavior by passing saveable = false to the @ComposeModel annotation.

How it works

The plugin is implemented as a KSP processor.

• The builder interface is simply a copy of the model interface with vals changed to vars, default getters erased, and the event handler function signatures changed.
• A private implementation class is generated. This class implements both the model interface and the builder interface. Since properties have the same names in both interfaces, they don't clash. Each property is backed by a MutableState. Two overloads of each event handler function are generated – one for each interface. Each pair of functions has a backing property that is simply a mutable lambda holder. When a builder event handler is called the backing property is set, and when the model function is called it is invoked. This is not a MutableState since nothing needs to be notified when the event handler changes. If the model is to be saveable, a Saver implementation is also generated for this class that stores each property in a map.
• The remember function simply calls remember { Impl() } or rememberSaveable { Impl() } and then passes it to the lambda argument on every composition before returning the remembered object.

Is this a terrible idea?

Probably. There are quite a few potential issues:

• If a parent model implementation reads its child's properties, I believe it won't see changes to them until the next composition pass – and this is usually strongly advised against by the Compose team when it comes up in the Kotlin Slack.
• It's easy to forget to set all the event handlers in the remember* function. This could maybe be enforced better with a real compiler plugin that could warn if there was a missing call.
• Ideally model composables would not be allowed to emit any UI. There's no way to enforce this at compile time, nor at runtime.
  • We could run the model composition separately from the UI composition, with an Applier type that doesn't allow emitting anything (Nothing nodes), but that's problematic because:
    • It still doesn't provide safety at compile time, only runtime.
    • Some things, like text editing, don't work when changes and updates are shuffled between different compositions.
  • We could wrap the root model composable in a special layout that throws if any children are emitted, but that would require remembering to wrap the root, and obviously would only provide runtime safety.

Status

This project is very rough. The code is super gross and undocumented, there's no real tests, and it's not published. There is a demo module that should build and run however, and you can checkout the repo and mess around if you like. There's some validation with vaguely useful error messages, but there's probably a lot of ways to get the plugin to just puke.

Future work

I don't expect I'll spend much more time on this, but if I wanted to make it a real thing, some features I'd like to add are:

• Annotation for leaving certain properties out of persistence (probably just use @Transient).
• Annotation for specifying custom Savers for individual properties.
• Helpers for writing unit tests – create a special composition that forbids emissions.
• Support model properties with StateFlow types. The builder interface would still just get a mutable property, but instead of being backed by a MutableState it would be backed by a MutableStateFlow. This makes it harder to do some of the other things, and the use case of supporting consumtion from non-Compose code can be addressed in a more elegant way (see below).
• Multiplatform support.
• The @ComposeModel annotation should be a @StableMarker to opt-in to compiler optimizations.
• Implement as a full-fledged compiler plugin instead of a KSP processor to integrate more tightly with the IDE (real-time redlines, not require a manual build to show changes to generated code), and maybe make the generated APIs cleaner.
• Optionally generate a simple factory function that returns an immutable, value-type-like implementation of the interface (implements equals and hashcode) and does so only using the properties, not the functions (one of the big issues we've had testing renderings in Workflow).
• Create a helper for consuming from legacy Android Views (similar to Workflow's LayoutRunner) that automatically observes snapshot reads in its update function to automatically update views that are configured using MutableState.
• Make it possible define custom annotations that alias specific combinations of @ComposeModel parameters:

  @ComposeModel(someProperty = true, someOtherProperty = false)
  annotation class SquareModel

• Optionally generate a rememberFooAsState or AsFlow function that has the same signature as rememberFoo but returns a MutableState<Foo> or StateFlow<Foo> instead of a Foo, and pushes a new value-type Foo (see above) the state on every change instead of updating only individual properties. This could be useful for integrating with libraries like Workflow which expect a stream of immutable objects, instead of a single object that changes over time. Would need to make sure updates aren't always a frame late though.
• Link the builder classes to their source interfaces in the type system so that other code can express relationships between them. E.g.

  // In the runtime artifact:
  interface ComposeModelBuilder<ModelT : Any>
  
  // Example of generated builder:
  interface FooModelBuilder : ComposeModelBuilder<FooModel> { /* … */ }

• Create factory and/or remember functions that don't take a builder lambda and instead return a Pair<FooModel, FooModelBuilder>. Then third-party abstractions could be created that do something like:

  fun <ModelT : Any, BuilderT : ComposeModelBuilder<ModelT>> doSomething(
    modelFactory: () -> Pair<ModelT, BuilderT>,
    customBuilder: BuilderT.() -> Unit
  ): ModelT {
    val (model, builder) = factory()
    // Do something with builder.
    customBuilder(builder)
    return model
  }
  
  // And be called like:
  val fooModel = doSomething(createFooModel(arg1, arg2)) {
    // Build the Foo somehow
  }