Can I do a synchronous request with volley?

Question

Imagine I\'m in a Service that already has a background thread. Can I do a request using volley in that same thread, so that callbacks happen synchronously?

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Answer 1

As a complementary observation to both @Blundells and @Mathews answers, I'm not sure any call is delivered to anything but the main thread by Volley.

The Source

Having a look at the RequestQueue implementation it seems the RequestQueue is using a NetworkDispatcher to execute the request and a ResponseDelivery to deliver the result (the ResponseDelivery is injected into the NetworkDispatcher). The ResponseDelivery is in turn created with a Handler spawn from the main thread (somewhere around line 112 in the RequestQueue implementation).

Somewhere about line 135 in the NetworkDispatcher implementation it seems like also successful results are delivered through the same ResponseDelivery as any errors. Again; a ResponseDelivery based on a Handler spawn from the main thread.

Rationale

For the use-case where a request is to be made from an IntentService it's fair to assume that the thread of the service should block until we have a response from Volley (to guarantee a living runtime scope to handle the result in).

Suggested solutions

One approach would be to override the default way a RequestQueue is created, where an alternative constructor is used instead, injecting a ResponseDelivery which spawns from the current thread rather than the main thread. I haven't investigated the implications of this, however.