Will there be any difference in performance if I iterate JsonArray instead of Arraylist inside onBindViewHolder?

Question

Method A (conventional method):

1. We get JsonArray from an API
2. Iterate that JsonArray (inside for loop) and Pass values from JsonArray to an object of Model class (Getter and Setter) and add that object of the model class to an ArrayList
3. Pass that ArrayList to recyclerAdapter
4. Iterate that ArrayList inside the onBindViewHolder method of recyclerAdapter
5. and set values to textView, imageView etc inside the onBindViewHolder method

Method B:

1. We get JsonArray from an API
2. Pass the whole JsonArray to recyclerAdapter

3. Iterate jsonArray inside onBindViewHolder (without using ArrayList) and setValues directly to textViews, imageViews etc as shown below

   @Override
   public void onBindViewHolder(Holder holder, int i) {
   
       try {
       holder.textView.setText(jsonArray.getJSONObject(i).getString("textKey"));
       } catch (JSONException e) {
       e.printStackTrace();
       }
   }
   

Will, there be any performance improvement while I use the second method as we are not using model class and ArrayList.

Will the performance decrease or remain same.

I don't care about readability, my only concern here is performance.

Note:- using try catch multiple times has no effect on performance so we can ignore that.

Answer 1

Will, there be any performance improvement while I use the second method as we are not using model class and ArrayList.

Will the performance decrease or remain same.

I don't care about readability, my only concern here is performance.

You will get a performance decrease with method B because you have extra call whenever you're calling the following:

holder.textView.setText(jsonArray.getJSONObject(i).getString("textKey"));

if you break down the above line, it would be something like this:

• holder.textView.setText()
• jsonArray.getJSONObject(i)
• JSONObject.getString("textKey")

You should note that JSONObject.getString("textKey") need to do something heavy to find the value with the key textKey by calling the following getString method code:

public String getString(String name) throws JSONException {
    Object object = get(name);
    String result = JSON.toString(object);
    if (result == null) {
        throw JSON.typeMismatch(name, object, "String");
    }
    return result;
}

you can see there is another extra method call of JSON object with JSON.toString(object):

static String toString(Object value) {
    if (value instanceof String) {
        return (String) value;
    } else if (value != null) {
        return String.valueOf(value);
    }
    return null;
}

You will get a performance hit because of this (although negligible).

The worse part is the following line:

holder.textView.setText(jsonArray.getJSONObject(i).getString("textKey"));

will always be called whenever your View is recycled. So, the performance hit is multiplied.