Why binding.myTextView returns a TextView? and not TextView

Question

In my layout that is called activity_main.xml, I have two TextView. I can access it from my MainActivity by using a variable

binding = ActivityMainBinding.inflate(layoutInflater)

in this way:

binding.textView1
binding.textView2

In my code binding.textView1 returns an object TextView but the second returns an object TextView?.

That forces me to access the second TextView with ?. operator like

binding.textView2?.text = "HelloWorld"

because using the . operator cause the error

Only safe (?.) or non-null asserted (!!.) calls are allowed on a nullable receiver of type TextView?

So the questions are there a method for defining a View not nullable in my layout? How is possible that two objects with the same property had different behavior?

Answer 1

The object was nullable because it was present not in all XML layouts, so in some layouts it was null.