How to create empty constructor for data class in Kotlin Android

Along with @miensol answer, let me add some details:

If you want a Java-visible empty constructor using data classes, you need to define it explicitely.

Using default values + constructor specifier is quite easy:

data class Activity(
    var updated_on: String = "",
    var tags: List<String> = emptyList(),
    var description: String = "",
    var user_id: List<Int> = emptyList(),
    var status_id: Int = -1,
    var title: String = "",
    var created_at: String = "",
    var data: HashMap<*, *> = hashMapOf<Any, Any>(),
    var id: Int = -1,
    var counts: LinkedTreeMap<*, *> = LinkedTreeMap<Any, Any>()
) {
    constructor() : this(title = "") // this constructor is an explicit
                                     // "empty" constructor, as seen by Java.
}

This means that with this trick you can now serialize/deserialize this object with the standard Java serializers (Jackson, Gson etc).

You have 2 options here:

1. Assign a default value to each primary constructor parameter:

   data class Activity(
       var updated_on: String = "",
       var tags: List<String> = emptyList(),
       var description: String = "",
       var user_id: List<Int> = emptyList(),
       var status_id: Int = -1,
       var title: String = "",
       var created_at: String = "",
       var data: HashMap<*, *> = hashMapOf<Any, Any>(),
       var id: Int = -1,
       var counts: LinkedTreeMap<*, *> = LinkedTreeMap<Any, Any>()
   ) 
   

2. Declare a secondary constructor that has no parameters:

   data class Activity(
       var updated_on: String,
       var tags: List<String>,
       var description: String,
       var user_id: List<Int>,
       var status_id: Int,
       var title: String,
       var created_at: String,
       var data: HashMap<*, *>,
       var id: Int,
       var counts: LinkedTreeMap<*, *>
   ) {
       constructor() : this("", emptyList(), 
                            "", emptyList(), -1, 
                            "", "", hashMapOf<Any, Any>(), 
                            -1, LinkedTreeMap<Any, Any>()
                            )
   }
   

If you don't rely on copy or equals of the Activity class or don't use the autogenerated data class methods at all you could use regular class like so:

class ActivityDto {
    var updated_on: String = "",
    var tags: List<String> = emptyList(),
    var description: String = "",
    var user_id: List<Int> = emptyList(),
    var status_id: Int = -1,
    var title: String = "",
    var created_at: String = "",
    var data: HashMap<*, *> = hashMapOf<Any, Any>(),
    var id: Int = -1,
    var counts: LinkedTreeMap<*, *> = LinkedTreeMap<Any, Any>()
}

Not every DTO needs to be a data class and vice versa. In fact in my experience I find data classes to be particularly useful in areas that involve some complex business logic.

the modern answer for this should be using Kotlin's no-arg compiler plugin which creates a non argument construct code for classic apies more about here

simply you have to add the plugin class path in build.gradle project level

    dependencies {
    ....

    classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-noarg:1.4.10"

    ....
    }

then configure your annotation to generate the no-arg constructor

apply plugin: "kotlin-noarg"

noArg {
      annotation("your.path.to.annotaion.NoArg")
      invokeInitializers = true
}

then define your annotation file NoArg.kt

 @Target(AnnotationTarget.CLASS)
 @Retention(AnnotationRetention.SOURCE)
 annotation class NoArg

finally in any data class you can simply use your own annotation

@NoArg
data class SomeClass( val datafield:Type , ...   )

I used to create my own no-arg constructor as the accepted answer , which i got by search but then this plugin released or something and I found it way cleaner .

If you give default values to all the fields - empty constructor is generated automatically by Kotlin.

data class User(var id: Long = -1,
                var uniqueIdentifier: String? = null)

and you can simply call:

val user = User()