rx.Single

September 16, 2015

rx.Single is a beta feature in RxJava that represents a single value, rather than a stream of values that an rx.Observable represents. This is useful in simplifying the mental model required for consumers of your API (e.g. a Retrofit service).

rx.Observable
  • Respond with an error.
  • Never respond.
  • Respond successfully with no data and end.
  • Respond successfully with a single value and end.
  • Respond successfully with multiple values and end.
  • Respond successfully with one or more values and don’t end.
rx.Single
  • Respond with an error.
  • Never respond.
  • Respond successfully with a single value.

Example

Consider a public API that retrieves a user’s profile from a network API.

Observable<Profile> getProfile();

The behavior of getProfile() is not immediately obvious - can getProfile() emit multiple values? when does it end? Maybe it emits a new Profile when it gets updated?

What if we use rx.Single instead?

Single<Profile> getProfile();

Now the behavior of getProfile() explicit - the consumers only need to consider a single value, and that behavior is enforced by the Java type system.

TL;DR

Consider using rx.Single when an API/Service layer should only emit one item.

See


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Written by Angus Morton.
I builds things.