ButterKnife Reflect

The butterknife-reflect artifact is an API-compatible replacement for butterknife which uses 100% reflection to fulfill field and method bindings for use during development.

Er, what? Why would I want this?

The normal butterknife artifact requires the use of butterknife-compiler as an annotation processor for compile-time validation of your bindings and code generation for runtime performance. This is a desirable feature for your CI and release builds, but it slows down iterative development. By using butterknife-reflect for only your IDE builds, you have one less annotation processor sitting between you and your running app. This is especially important for Kotlin-only or Java/Kotlin mixed projects using KAPT. And if butterknife-compiler is your only annotation processor for a module, using butterknife-reflect means that zero annotation processors run during development.

Can I use this in production?

No.

Well technically you can, but don't. It's slow, inefficient, and lacks the level of validation that normal Butter Knife usage provides.

Usage

Kotlin modules:

dependencies {
  if (properties.containsKey('android.injected.invoked.from.ide')) {
    implementation 'com.jakewharton:butterknife-reflect:<version>'
  } else {
    implementation 'com.jakewharton:butterknife:<version>'
    kapt 'com.jakewharton:butterknife-compiler:<version>'
  }
}

Java modules:

dependencies {
  if (properties.containsKey('android.injected.invoked.from.ide')) {
    implementation 'com.jakewharton:butterknife-reflect:<version>'
  } else {
    implementation 'com.jakewharton:butterknife:<version>'
    annotationProcessor 'com.jakewharton:butterknife-compiler:<version>'
  }
}

(Replacing <version> with whatever version you are using.)

If you have a dedicated variant for development you can skip the if check and simply add butterknife-reflect to that variant and butterknife+butterknife-compiler for the regular variants.