AsyncTask in Android with Kotlin

Question

How to make an API call in Android with Kotlin?

I have heard of Anko . But I want to use methods provided by Kotlin like in Android we have Asynctask for background

Answer 1

AsyncTask was deprecated in API level 30. To implement similar behavior we can use Kotlin concurrency utilities (coroutines).

Create extension function on CoroutineScope:

fun  CoroutineScope.executeAsyncTask(
        onPreExecute: () -> Unit,
        doInBackground: () -> R,
        onPostExecute: (R) -> Unit
) = launch {
    onPreExecute()
    val result = withContext(Dispatchers.IO) { // runs in background thread without blocking the Main Thread
        doInBackground()
    }
    onPostExecute(result)
}

Now it can be used on any CoroutineScope instance, for example, in ViewModel:

class MyViewModel : ViewModel() {

      fun someFun() {
          viewModelScope.executeAsyncTask(onPreExecute = {
              // ...
          }, doInBackground = {
              // ...
              "Result" // send data to "onPostExecute"
          }, onPostExecute = {
              // ... here "it" is a data returned from "doInBackground"
          })
      }
  }

or in Activity/Fragment:

lifecycleScope.executeAsyncTask(onPreExecute = {
      // ...
  }, doInBackground = {
      // ...
      "Result" // send data to "onPostExecute"
  }, onPostExecute = {
      // ... here "it" is a data returned from "doInBackground"
  })

To use viewModelScope or lifecycleScope add next line(s) to dependencies of the app's build.gradle file:

implementation "androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-viewmodel-ktx:$LIFECYCLE_VERSION" // for viewModelScope
implementation "androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-runtime-ktx:$LIFECYCLE_VERSION" // for lifecycleScope