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I'm trying to create a way to search inside a RecyclerView with animating the items that have been searched (hide the ones that don't meet the condition, and add the ones that do, if they're not already in).

Of course, the simplest way to search a RecyclerView is just filter the list and notifyDataSetChanged(). But most developers know that this call recreates the adapter from scratch, almost like it was just assigned. Also, this call doesn't give any feeling of the items being searched, as all the items appear at once.

I've tried creating some way where the items get added or removed to the list as they meet/not meet the condition, but this loses the order of the items. Unless of course you search where the item is in the main list, and put it where it belongs. Which makes the searching longer since you're searching again every insert.

I looked into using a TreeMap, but trees can't be accessed by index, only by key.

I've also used SparseArray, the only problem was the SparseArray doesn't tell you in what index was the item inserted, you'll have to search for the item again (in order to notify the adapter).

Is there a recommended way of doing it? Some tutorial I have missed? Searching around I could only find the notifyDatasetChanged() solution.

Ahmad Sattout
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I believe what you're searching for is DiffUtil. Here's a well explained Medium article explaining it's usage.

Another interesting answer I've come across when looking into this is the SO Answer provided by Xaver Kapeller (Just search for SortedListAdapter in the page, although his answer is a very nice read imo). His SortedListAdapter library makes the code much more simpler and cleaner.

Chrisvin Jem
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