When developing a modularized Android project it is expected to have many modules and some of which are interdependent. However, as the project grows, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of the modules location and names, which can lead to situations where one have to spend some amount of time remembering this info, or even to compilation errors.

It is very common to have similar lines in our build.gradle when declaring the project dependencies:

dependencies {
    implementation(project(":features:login"))
    implementation(project(":libraries:ui"))
}

Fortunately, in Gradle 7.0, the one required with Android Studio 2020.3.1 Artic Fox, a new type-safe project accessors was included to make out life easier.

Setting up

First of all, keep in mind that this feature is experimental at the moment. At the time that this article was written, the latest stable version for Gradle is 7.2, but this feature is expected to become stable in future releases.

In order to enable this feature in our project, we need to add the following line to our setting.gradle(kts) file:

enableFeaturePreview("TYPESAFE_PROJECT_ACCESSORS")

Accessing the modules

After adding the experimental line and syncing Gradle files, it is now possible to access the modules in a new way. Now, instead of hard-coding the modules location and names, we have a safer way, including IDE auto-complete. Let’s take on the new approach:

dependencies {
    implementation(projects.features.login)
    implementation(projects.libraries.ui)
}

IDE auto-complete for Gradle modules

Another great addition that this feature brings to the table is smarter compilation errors. Previously, if some module were renamed or moved, the script would fail only when compiling the app. When using the type-safe project accessors, the error will now shown up with more context:

Compilation error when Gradle modules is not correct

General tips

All the project accessors are mapped from the project path, this means that if a module path is :libraries:commons:ui, then the project accessor will be projects.commons.ui and so on.

Also, when a module was created with kebab case ( some-module-api) or snake case ( some_module_api), both will be converted to camel case when using the accessors ( projects.someModuleApi).

What’s next?

If you want to take a deep dive in the code, please take a look in the Pull Request submitted to Alkaa in order to update all the hard-coded references to project accessors.

During my tests, I only was able to make the IDE auto-complete to work when using build.gradle.kts files. There is support for regular build.gradle files however it seems that it does not have the same powerful support like its .kts counterpart.