refactor: Remove redundant View castings in Android projects

[dr0pdb]

Software and hardware versions

Latest code from development branch.

Problem description

Currently there are a lot of instances of redundant View castings in the project.
For eg.

infoPane = (LinearLayout) view.findViewById(R.id.sync_info_pane);

can be replaced by

infoPane = view.findViewById(R.id.sync_info_pane);

They were required before but aren't required now and Android studio suggests removing them.

Steps to reproduce the problem

NA

Expected behavior

They should be removed.

Other information

NA

@jbeorse Views ?
Quick win for first timers may be 😄

[jbeorse]

Oh that is interesting. Does this reduce the amount of lint warnings we will get?

[dr0pdb]

@jbeorse
Yes i think so. Code inspection shows 65 instances of Redundant type casts in the project. A large number of those are these findViewById castings.
Here is a stackoverflow discussion on this.

[jbeorse]

Our compileVersion is 27, so it does seem like this should work. Good find! I'll mark it as a quick win, certainly contributor friendly. Go ahead and claim it if you like. 😄

[jbeorse]

Your title mentions only Services, but I imagine this is true in Survey, Tables, and Scan as well. I think we should extend it to all 4 apps.

[dr0pdb]

@opendatakit-bot claim

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[linl33]

Hi @srv-twry thank you for your pull requests!

There are some more redundant casts in androidlibrary, after those are fixed I will close this issue.

[VarunT11]

@linl33 @wbrunette If this issue is still open, I would like to work on this.

[wbrunette]

@VarunT11 the issue is still open. I will assign it to you.

[VarunT11]

@wbrunette I have removed the Redundant View Castings from Android Library in odk-x/androidlibrary#191.
Apart from this, I saw some Redundant Castings in Services also which were being suggested to be removed by Android Studio. So shall I remove those Redundant Castings also?

[linl33]

@VarunT11 Yes, please remove the ones in Services as well. Thank you.

[wbrunette]

@VarunT11 can you check out androidcommon, survey, and tables? Then we can close this issue. Good work!

[VarunT11]

@wbrunette Yes Sure! I will check these as well.

[VarunT11]

@wbrunette @linl33 While I was going through the code-base of Android Common for finding the Redundant Castings, there were several instances of suggestion by Android Studio to replace some Anonymous Methods with Lambda Expressions. Same is the case with Survey and Tables also.
For example, consider the following code snippet -

new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
              @Override
              public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {

              //Some Code

              }
}

The above method was being suggested to be replaced with the following -

(dialog, which) -> {

              //Some Code

            }

This replacement would reduce the number of lint warnings and also make some imports unusable and hence we can remove them too.
So shall I replace these Anonymous Methods with the Lambda Expressions?

[wbrunette]

Since the issue is specifically for redundant casts, let's stick to that. Also ODK-X still supports Android devices that run Android 7 that don't support Lamdas. I hope the Android compile system would handle it correctly but not worth creating weird bugs we would have to track down later.

[VarunT11]

• Survey: Removed the Redundant Castings in Removed the Redundant Castings survey#146.
• Tables: Removed the Redundant Castings in Removed the Redundant Castings and Unused Imports tables#175.
• Android Common: No Redundant Castings Found.

PS: @wbrunette @linl33 I have made the PRs. Please review them!