Deterministic Title Placeholder Painter

Deterministic title placeholder painter

Items without artwork need better than a shared grey square: something unique per item, identical every time, and available synchronously — before, during and instead of a network load. Hashing the title into a gradient gives all three; a Painter lets the loader treat it as an image.

// adapted
private fun gradientFromTitle(title: String): List<Color> {
    val hash = title.hashCode()
    val hue1 = ((hash and 0xFF) / 255f) * 360f
    val hue2 = (((hash shr 8) and 0xFF) / 255f) * 360f
    return listOf(hsvToColor(hue1, 0.7f, 0.9f), hsvToColor(hue2, 0.7f, 0.85f))
}

private class TitlePlaceholderPainter(
    private val size: Size,
    private val title: String,
    private val textLayoutResult: TextLayoutResult,
    private val badge: Painter,
) : Painter() {
    override val intrinsicSize: Size get() = size

    override fun DrawScope.onDraw() {
        drawRoundRect(Brush.linearGradient(gradientFromTitle(title)), size = size,
                      cornerRadius = CornerRadius(16f, 16f))   // this `size` is DrawScope's
        drawText(textLayoutResult, topLeft = bottomStartWithInset(textLayoutResult.size, size))
        val centre = Offset(size.width * 0.9f, size.height * 0.1f)
        drawCircle(center = centre, color = Color.White, radius = size.width * 0.05f)
        translate(left = centre.x - size.width * 0.075f, top = centre.y - size.height * 0.075f) {
            with(badge) { draw(size * 0.15f, alpha = 0.2f) }
        }
    }
}

The factory is where the work that must not happen per frame goes:

// adapted; the `remember` around the painter is the fix described under Traps
@Composable
fun rememberTitlePlaceholder(title: String, style: TextStyle, sizeDp: Pair<Dp, Dp>): Painter {
    val density = LocalDensity.current
    val measurer = rememberTextMeasurer()
    val layout = remember(title, style, sizeDp) {
        measurer.measure(
            title,
            style.copy(color = Color.White, textAlign = TextAlign.Start),
            maxLines = 2, softWrap = true, overflow = TextOverflow.Ellipsis,
            layoutDirection = LayoutDirection.Ltr,
            constraints = with(density) {           // tile size MINUS its padding; names required
                Constraints(maxWidth = (sizeDp.first - 32.dp).roundToPx(),
                            maxHeight = (sizeDp.second - 32.dp).roundToPx())
            },
        )
    }
    val badge = painterResource(Res.drawable.badge)
    val px = with(density) { Size(sizeDp.first.toPx(), sizeDp.second.toPx()) }
    return remember(title, layout, badge, px) { TitlePlaceholderPainter(px, title, layout, badge) }
}

Traps

Determinism is the whole feature, so check what your hash actually promises. On Kotlin/JVM, String.hashCode() delegates to the JDK's, whose algorithm is written into the platform specification — stable across runs, machines and JDK versions, which is why it is safe here. That guarantee is a JVM one: unspecified for Kotlin/Native and Kotlin/JS, silent about non-String types. Add a Native or web target, or persist the colour, and hash the bytes yourself.

Mask the hash, do not take a remainder of it. A hash is signed, and hash % 256 is negative for roughly half of all inputs — a negative hue that falls out of every branch of an HSV conversion. hash and 0xFF is correct for negative values because it works on the two's-complement bits. Two hues taken from adjacent bytes can also land next to each other and read as flat; for guaranteed contrast, derive the second hue from the first plus a fixed rotation.

Measure text in composition; draw in onDraw. Painter.onDraw runs every frame it is visible, so a measurement there allocates and lays out per frame. Measure once, keyed on title, style and size, and pass the immutable result in. Constrain it to the tile minus its padding, or the text is laid out for the full width and drawn overlapping the edges. There is no layout pass, so positioning is arithmetic: compute the top-left yourself and add back the inset.

A Painter has no density, so convert before you construct it. Take LocalDensity in the composable, turn the Dp size into pixels there, and hand the painter pixels — reporting that as intrinsicSize, since Size.Unspecified gives an image composable nothing to size itself from.

Inside onDraw, size is not your size. onDraw is declared DrawScope.onDraw(), so the extension receiver outranks the dispatch receiver: every unqualified size above resolves to DrawScope.size, the size the painter is actually being drawn at — never the constructor property of the same name. The sample already honours the draw size; the stored one survives only in intrinsicSize (decompile it — the compiled onDraw never touches the field). Drawing at the stored size means writing this@TitlePlaceholderPainter.size, and mixing the two is the bug: a drawRoundRect at the stored size beside a drawCircle centred on DrawScope.size comes apart the first time a caller draws at anything but the intrinsic size.

Fill all three image slots, because they are three different states. placeholder is "loading", error is "the request failed", fallback is "the model was null" — the coverless case this painter exists for. Setting only placeholder leaves those items blank.

Remember the painter, not just the measurement. Rebuilding it per composition hands the image composable a new instance every time, defeating skipping for that call. The originating code remembers the layout but not the painter, harmless only because that painter holds no state.

Reuse one generator everywhere the colour must agree. A detail page tinting its background for a coverless item must call the same function its tile calls — see artwork-palette-theming and overflow-tilted-browse-card.

Verifying it

1. Each image call site with whichever of the three slots it names, interleaved in file order — an AsyncImage( line followed by fewer than three slot lines before the next one is missing a state. -[0-9]+- anchors to a context line, so a bare error = in a data class cannot inflate it; widen -A16 where a long model = block pushes a call's slots out of the window.

   grep -rn -A16 --include='*.kt' --exclude-dir=build "AsyncImage(" . \
     | grep -E "AsyncImage\(|-[0-9]+-[[:space:]]*(placeholder|error|fallback) ="
   

2. Painters constructed in composition without being remembered:

   grep -rn --include='*.kt' -B4 "^\s*return [A-Z][A-Za-z]*Painter(" . | grep -v '/build/'
   

3. Signed-hash remainders, the negative-hue bug. Expect no output; every hit is a colour that is wrong for about half of all inputs:

   grep -rn --include='*.kt' -E "hashCode\(\) *%" . | grep -v '/build/'
   

4. Determinism itself, which no grep can check: render the same list twice in one session and across a restart, and confirm the colours match both times. Then render a title differing by one character — a generator that ignores part of its input passes the first test and fails this one.