Removing/Adding constraint programmatically in ConstraintLayout

I have not worked through your code, but the following illustrates how to break and make the constraint using ConstraintSet.

ConstraintSet set = new ConstraintSet();
ConstraintLayout layout;

layout = (ConstraintLayout) findViewById(R.id.layout);
set.clone(layout);
// The following breaks the connection.
set.clear(R.id.bottomText, ConstraintSet.TOP);
// Comment out line above and uncomment line below to make the connection.
// set.connect(R.id.bottomText, ConstraintSet.TOP, R.id.imageView, ConstraintSet.BOTTOM, 0);
set.applyTo(layout);

Another way of doing this is with ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams.UNSET. This way is not using ConstraintSet.clear.

Assuming we want to remove the bottom constraint of our constraintLayout itself but can be any view:

val containerParams = cl_container.layoutParams as ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams
containerParams.bottomToBottom = ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams.UNSET
cl_container.layoutParams = containerParams

Here is the Java version of the answer from j2emanue using ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams, which works without specifying the id of the element that the layout is contrained to:

final ConstraintLayout constraintLayout = findViewById(R.id.constraintLayout);
final ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams layoutParams = (ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams) constraintLayout.getLayoutParams();
layoutParams.bottomToBottom = ConstraintLayout.LayoutParams.UNSET;
constraintLayout.setLayoutParams(layoutParams);