Book Image

Simplifying Android Development with Coroutines and Flows

By : Jomar Tigcal
Book Image

Simplifying Android Development with Coroutines and Flows

By: Jomar Tigcal

Overview of this book

Coroutines and flows are the new recommended way for developers to carry out asynchronous programming in Android using simple, modern, and testable code. This book will teach you how coroutines and flows work and how to use them in building Android applications, along with helping you to develop modern Android applications with asynchronous programming using real data. The book begins by showing you how to create and handle Kotlin coroutines on Android. You’ll explore asynchronous programming in Kotlin, and understand how to test Kotlin coroutines. Next, you'll learn about Kotlin flows on Android, and have a closer look at using Kotlin flows by getting to grips with handling flow cancellations and exceptions and testing the flows. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to build high-quality and maintainable Android applications using coroutines and flows.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Kotlin Coroutines on Android
6
Part 2 – Kotlin Flows on Android

Testing coroutines

In this section, we will focus on how you can test your coroutines. You can create tests for classes such as ViewModel that launch a coroutine.

For coroutines launched using Dispatchers.Main, your unit tests will fail with the following error message:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Module with the Main dispatcher had failed to initialize. For tests Dispatchers.setMain from kotlinx-coroutines-test module can be used

This exception happens because Dispatchers.Main uses Looper.getMainLooper(), the application’s main thread. This main looper is not available in Android for local unit tests. To make your tests work, you must use the Dispatchers.setMain extension function to change the Main dispatcher. For example, you can create a function in your test class that will run before your tests:

@Before
fun setUp() {
    Dispatchers.setMain(UnconfinedTestDispatcher())
}

The setUp function will run before the tests. It will...