Handling positions in FirebaseRecyclerAdapter

I have fiddled with the FirebaseRecyclerAdapter for quite some time now. It’s really a great tool to populate a custom list/recycler view very fast with all of its features. However, one thing that I would like to ask is how to handle positions of items inside the adapter itself.

So for example, I want to mimic this small feature that WhatsApp has in their chats.

So, in a group chat setting, if a person sends more than one consecutive message in a row, the display name of that particular person will be invisible.

The logic behind it according to my understanding: if the person who sends the message is the same for (position – 1), then I will just make the EditText invisible for (position). This is, of course, to prevent a very long stream of text with minimum amounts of repetitive information.

Let’s say the JSON tree from Firebase database is as follows.

{
  "messages" : {
    "pushed_id_1" : {
      "message_sender" : "AppleJuice",
      "message_text" : "Are you free?"
    },
    "pushed_id_2" : {
      "message_sender" : "AppleJuice",
      "message_text" : "On Saturday I mean..."
    }
  }
}

The FirebaseRecyclerAdapter would look like this.

FirebaseRecyclerAdapter<Message, MessageViewHolder> adapter = new FirebaseRecyclerAdapter<Message, MessageViewHolder>(Message.class, R.layout.message_item, MessageViewHolder.class, myRef) {

            @Override
            protected void populateViewHolder(MyBookingsViewHolder viewHolder, Booking model, int position) {
                viewHolder.messageSender.setText(model.getMessage_sender());
                viewHolder.messageText.setText(model.getMessage_text());

                //put some code here to implement the feature that we need
            }
        };
        messages_recycler_menu.setAdapter(adapter);

The furthest I have gone is to use getItemCount() method in the FirebaseRecyclerAdapter, but I am still unable to achieve the feature that mimics that of Whatsapp’s that I was talking about previously.

Is there a method that can achieve this? Or am I missing something very important in this example?

Answer

As discussed in comments:

Let’s suppose I received message and stored sender’s name in constant String that should be static constant in some class i.e. AppConstants so that It can be accessed everywhere therefore after that:

in populateViewHolder or in your message receiver do something like this:

if (TextUtils.isEqual(storedSender,model.getMessage_sender())){ 
        viewHolder.messageSender.setVisiblity(View.GONE) 
       } 
    else{ 
        // do your normal flow 
        viewHolder.messageSender.setVisiblity(View.VISIBLE); 
    storedSender = model.getMessage_sender(); 
    }

In this way automatically the last message’s sender’s name will be updated , this is exactly what you were trying to achieve by adapter position!