Migrate to Kotlin coroutines in Android with Kotlin 1.3

Question

What should I change in my build.gradle file or import in classes to use stable coroutine functions in my Android project with Kotlin 1.3 ?

Fragment abo

Answer 1

In build.gradle change a library to

implementation 'org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-android:1.1.1'.

Remove, if was added:

kotlin {
    experimental {
        coroutines "enable"
    }
}

In code change launch to GlobalScope.launch(Dispatchers.IO) or GlobalScope.launch(Dispatchers.Main).

UPDATE

Please, use local coroutine context instead of global scope (see, for instance, http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/coroutines/coroutine-context-and-dispatchers.html).

For Activity

See https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/blob/master/ui/coroutines-guide-ui.md.

Implement CoroutineScope:

class YourActivity : AppCompatActivity(), CoroutineScope {

Add a local variable job and initialize it:

private lateinit var job: Job

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

    job = Job()
}

Create a coroutine context and cancel it on Activity destroy:

override fun onDestroy() {
    job.cancel()
    super.onDestroy()
}

override val coroutineContext: CoroutineContext
    get() = Dispatchers.Main + job

For Fragment (the same as in Activity)

Implement CoroutineScope:

class YourFragment : Fragment(), CoroutineScope {

Create a local variable job and initialize it in onCreate(). (I tried to write private val job: Job = Job(), but bumped into problem that in ViewPager you will create Fragments and their jobs. As we will cancel the job in onDestroy() during swiping in ViewPager, we should recreate the job).

private lateinit var job: Job

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

    ...
    job = Job()
}

Create a coroutine context and cancel it on Fragment destroy:

override val coroutineContext: CoroutineContext
    get() = Dispatchers.Main + job // You can use different variants here. 

override fun onDestroy() {
    job.cancel()
    super.onDestroy()
}

A launch example

Use launch as usual:

override fun onViewCreated(view: View, savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onViewCreated(view, savedInstanceState)
    launch {
        // Wait for result of I/O operation without blocking the main thread.
        withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
            interactor.getCountry().let {
                countryName = it.name
            }
        }

        // Update views in the UI thread.
        country.updateCaption(countryName)
    }
}

In my case a problem occured when I used API requests with usual callbacks. A launch interior inside a callback hasn't been called. So I rewrote that code with interactors.