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DocumentFileCompat

A faster alternative to AndroidX's DocumentFile.

The Problem with DocumentFile

It is horribly slow!
For almost every method, there is a query to ContentResolver.

The most common one is DocumentFile.findFile(), DocumentFile.getName() and other is building a Custom Data Model with multiple parameters.
This can take like a horrible amount of time.

Solution

DocumentFileCompat is a drop-in replacement which gathers relevant parameters when querying for files.
The performance can sometimes peak to 2x or quite higher, depending on the size of the folder.

Check the screenshots below:

<img src="/screenshots/filecompat_directory_perf.jpeg" height="500"/>       <img src="/screenshots/filecompat_file_perf.jpeg" height="500"/>

48 whopping seconds for directory listing compared to 3.5! (Obviously, No competition with the Native File API).
Also extracting file information does not take that much time but the improvement is still significant.

Note: DocumentFileCompat is something that I used internally for some projects & therefore I didn't do much of file manipulation with it (only delete files) <strike>and therefore this API does not offer too much out of the box</strike>.
This is now a completely usable alternative to DocumentFile.

Installation

Gradle

dependencies {
    implementation "com.lazygeniouz:dfc:$latest_version"
}

Maven


<dependency>
    <groupId>com.lazygeniouz</groupId>
    <artifactId>dfc</artifactId>
    <version>$latest_version</version>
    <type>aar</type>
</dependency>

Usage

Almost all of the methods & getters are identical to DocumentFile, you'll just have to replace the imports.
Additional methods like copyTo(destination: Uri) & copyFrom(source: Uri) are added as well.

Reference:

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/a/42187419/6819340
  2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/63466997/6819340

Issues & Suggestions

Create a new issue if you experience any problem or have any suggestions.
I'll appreciate if you create a PR as well (if possible).

Finally, don't forget to ⭐️ the library! :)