Movement Engineering at Scale. How Airbnb is making use of declarative… | by Cal Stephens | The Airbnb Tech Weblog | Dec, 2022

How Airbnb is making use of declarative design patterns to quickly construct fluid transition animations

By: Cal Stephens

Movement is a key a part of what makes a digital expertise each simple and pleasant to make use of. Fluid transitions between states and screens are key for serving to the consumer protect context as they navigate all through a characteristic. Fast thrives of animation make an app come alive, and assist give it a definite character.

At Airbnb we launch a whole bunch of options and experiments which were developed by engineers throughout many groups. When constructing at this scale, it’s vital to contemplate effectivity and maintainability all through our tech stack–and movement isn’t any exception. Including animations to a characteristic must be quick and simple. The tooling should praise and match naturally with different parts of our characteristic structure. If an animation takes too lengthy to construct or is simply too troublesome to combine with the general characteristic structure, then it’s typically the primary a part of a product expertise that will get dropped when translating from design to implementation.

On this put up, we’ll talk about a brand new framework for iOS that we’ve created to assist make this imaginative and prescient a actuality.

Let’s take into account this transition on the Airbnb app’s homepage, which takes customers from search outcomes to an expanded search enter display screen:

The transition is a key a part of the design, making the complete search expertise really feel cohesive and light-weight.

Inside conventional UIKit patterns, there are two methods to construct a transition like this. One is to create a single, large view controller that incorporates each the search outcomes and the search enter screens, and orchestrates a transition between the 2 states utilizing crucial UIView animation blocks. Whereas this method is straightforward to construct, it has the draw back of tightly coupling these two screens, making them far much less maintainable and moveable.

The opposite method is to implement every display screen as a separate view controller, and create a bespoke UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning implementation that extracts related views from every view hierarchy after which animates them. That is sometimes extra difficult to implement, however has the important thing advantage of letting every particular person display screen be constructed as a separate UIViewController such as you would for every other characteristic.

Prior to now, we’ve constructed transitions with each of those approaches, and located that they each sometimes require a whole bunch of traces of fragile, crucial code. This meant customized transitions had been time consuming to construct and troublesome to take care of, in order that they had been sometimes not included as a part of a workforce’s primary characteristic growth move.

A typical development has been to maneuver away from this form of crucial system design and in the direction of declarative patterns. We use declarative programs extensively at Airbnb–we leverage frameworks like Epoxy and SwiftUI to declaratively outline the structure of every display screen. Screens are mixed into options and flows utilizing declarative navigation APIs. We’ve discovered these declarative programs unlock substantial productiveness positive factors, by letting engineers deal with defining how the app ought to behave and abstracting away the complicated underlying implementation particulars.

To simplify and speed-up the method of including transitions to our app, we’ve created a new framework for constructing transitions declaratively, fairly than imperatively as we did earlier than. We’ve discovered that this new method has made it a lot less complicated to construct customized transitions, and because of this much more engineers have been capable of simply add wealthy and pleasant transitions to their screens even on tight timelines.

To carry out a transition with this framework, you merely present the preliminary state and last state (or within the case of a display screen transition, the supply and vacation spot view controllers) together with a declarative transition definition of how every particular person component on the display screen must be animated. The framework’s generic UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning implementation handles every little thing else routinely.

This new framework has change into instrumental to how we construct options. It powers most of the new options included in Airbnb’s 2022 Summer Release and 2022 Winter Release, serving to make them simple and pleasant to make use of:

As an introduction, let’s begin with a instance. Right here’s a easy “search” interplay the place a date picker in a backside sheet slides up over a web page of content material:

On this instance, there are two separate view controllers: the search outcomes display screen and the date picker display screen. Every of the parts we wish to animate are tagged with an identifier to determine their id.

These identifiers allow us to refer to every part semantically by identify, fairly than by straight referencing the UIView occasion. For instance, the Discover.searchNavigationBarPill part on every display screen is a separate UIView occasion, however since they’re tagged with the identical identifier the 2 view situations are thought of separate “states” of the identical part.

Now that we’ve recognized the parts that we wish to animate, we will outline how they need to animate. For this transition we wish:

1. The background to fade in
2. The underside sheet to slip up from the underside of the display screen
3. The navigation bar to animate between the primary state and second state (a “shared component” animation).

We will categorical this as a easy transition definition:

let transitionDefinition: TransitionDefinition = [
BottomSheet.backgroundView: .crossfade,
BottomSheet.foregroundView: .edgeTranslation(.bottom),
Explore.searchNavigationBarPill: .sharedElement,
]

Revisiting the instance above for increasing and collapsing the search enter display screen, we wish:

1. The background to blur
2. The highest bar and backside bars to slip in
3. The house display screen search bar to transition into the “the place are you going?” card
4. The opposite two search playing cards to fade in whereas staying anchored relative to the “the place are you going? card

Right here’s how that animation is outlined utilizing the declarative transition definition syntax:

let transitionDefinition: TransitionDefinition = [
SearchInput.background: .blur,
SearchInput.topBar: .translateY(-40),
SearchInput.bottomBar: .edgeTranslation(.bottom),
SearchInput.whereCard: .sharedElement,
SearchInput.whereCardContent: .crossfade,
SearchInput.searchInput: .crossfade,
SearchInput.whenCard: .anchorTranslation(relativeTo: SearchInput.whereCard),
SearchInput.whoCard: .anchorTranslation(relativeTo: SearchInput.whereCard),
]

This declarative transition definition API is highly effective and versatile, but it surely solely tells half the story. To really carry out the animation, our framework offers a generic UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning implementation that takes the transition definition and orchestrates the transition animation. To discover how this implementation works, we’ll return to the easy “search” interplay.

First, the framework traverses the view hierarchy of each the supply and vacation spot screens to extract the UIView for every of the identifiers being animated. This determines whether or not or not a given identifier is current on every display screen, and types an identifier hierarchy (very like the view hierarchy of a display screen).

The identifier hierarchies of the supply and vacation spot are diffed to find out whether or not a person part was added, eliminated, or current in each. If the view was added or eliminated, the framework will use the animation specified within the transition definition. If the view was current in each states, the framework as an alternative performs a “shared component animation” the place the part animates from its preliminary place to its last place whereas its content material is up to date. These shared components are animated recursively–every part can present its personal identifier hierarchy of kid components, which is diffed and animated as effectively.

To really carry out these animations, we want a single view hierarchy that matches the construction of our identifier hierarchy. We will’t simply mix the supply and vacation spot screens right into a single view hierarchy by layering them on prime of one another, as a result of the ordering can be unsuitable. On this case, if we simply positioned the vacation spot display screen over the supply display screen then the supply Discover.searchNavigationBarPill view can be under the vacation spot BottomSheet.backgroundView component, which doesn’t match the identifier hierarchy.

As an alternative, we now have to create a separate view hierarchy that matches the construction of the identifier hierarchy. This requires making copies of the parts being animated and including them to the UIKit transition container. Most UIViews aren’t trivially copyable, so copies are sometimes made by “snapshotting” the view (rendering it as a picture). We briefly cover the “unique view” whereas the animation is enjoying, so solely the snapshot is seen.

As soon as the framework has arrange the transition container’s view hierarchy and decided the precise animation to make use of for every part, the animations simply must be utilized and performed. That is the place the underlying crucial UIView animations are carried out.

Like with Epoxy and different declarative programs, abstracting away the underlying complexity and offering a easy declarative interface makes it doable for engineers to deal with the what fairly than the how. The declarative transition definition for these animations are only some traces of code, which is by itself a enormous enchancment over any possible crucial implementation. And since our declarative feature-building APIs have first-class help for UIKit UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning implementations, these declarative transitions will be built-in into current options with out making any structure adjustments. This considerably accelerates characteristic growth, making it simpler than ever to create extremely polished transitions, whereas additionally enabling long-term flexibility and maintainability.

We now have a packed roadmap forward. One space of lively work is bettering interoperability with SwiftUI. This lets us seamlessly transition between UIKit and SwiftUI-based screens, which unlocks incremental adoption of SwiftUI in our app with out having to sacrifice movement. We’re additionally exploring making comparable frameworks accessible on net and Android. Our long-term purpose right here is to make it as simple as doable to translate our designer’s nice concepts into precise delivery merchandise, on all platforms.

Keen on working at Airbnb? Take a look at these open roles:

Staff Software Engineer, Wishlists

Staff Software Engineer, Guests & Hosts

Staff Android Software Engineer, Guest

Many due to Eric Horacek and Matthew Cheok for his or her main contributions to Airbnb’s movement structure and our declarative transition framework.