Prevent swipe to delete recyclerview item

Question

I want to catch a vertical swipe in an horizontal RecyclerView. Each item is simply a CircleImageView.
I found many resources on internet (like Drag and swipe with RecyclerView, Android - Swipe to delete RecyclerView) but those solutions ends deleting the item. I don't know if the term swipe requires also that the item is deleted or not.
What I want to achieve is to catch the swipe action on an item in the RecyclerView, but without delete the item itself from the RecyclerView.
I think that a good idea is to override the method onChildDraw() like suggested here: How to detect if Recyclerview item is being swiped?, but I can't understand how to achieve the behaviour I want.
My idea is: while the user swipes an item, the item itself moves in that direction; when the user end the touch event, the item has to come back to the original position (maybe changing the background color).

EDIT 1: How to have swipe to delete and swipe to archive in two colours in Recyclerview Android probably can help, but it doesn't achieve the behaviour that I need. The item has to come back to the original position.

Answer 1

Your RecyclerView has RecyclerView.Adapter attached to it. The adapter determines what information that the RecyclerView can see and display. So, if item number 10, out of a 100-item backing array (managed by you) is swiped, the adapter can report that the array now contains 99 items and not ever present the swiped item to the RecyclerView. That way the item appears to be deleted but is maintained internally and still accessible programmatically. How you manage that internal state is up to you and dependent upon your implementation.

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If, however you want to not remove the item from the screen but just change its appearance, I think that you would need to look at the method onItemDismiss that actually removes the item and notifies the adapter of the data change.

public void onItemDismiss(int position) {
    mItems.remove(position);
    notifyItemRemoved(position);
}

It is here that you would make the change. The item would stay in the adapter. You would also need to flag that position as "swiped" in case the view holders are recycle so you can maintain the visual "swiped" state.

public void onItemDismiss(int position) {
    // Change background color, etc.
}

Take a look at code that has a "swipe to delete" function with "undo" for some ideas. Here is an example with a dialog that is called before deletion actually occurs if "Cancel" is clicked. There are many other examples of "undo" available. What you are trying to do can be considered to be an immediate and implicit "undo" with a visual change to the background.

If you want to have the item move back into position after a swipe, the following should work:

public void onItemDismiss(int position) {
    notifyItemChanged(position);
}