Supporting Different Item Types

In the previous sections, we learned how to handle a list of items of a single type (in our case, all our items were CatUiModel). What happens if you want to support more than one type of item? A good example of this would be having group titles within our list.

Let's say that instead of getting a list of cats, we instead get a list containing happy cats and sad cats. Each of the two groups of cats is preceded by a title of the corresponding group. Instead of a list of CatUiModel instances, our list would now contain ListItem instances. ListItem might look like this:

sealed class ListItem {
    data class Group(val name: String) : ListItem()
    data class Cat(val data: CatUiModel) : ListItem()
}

Our list of items may look like this:

listOf(
    ListItem.Group("Happy Cats"),
    ListItem.Cat(
        CatUiModel...