How to get correct return value for suspend function when using GlobalScope.launch? - kotlin

Question

I have a suspend function
private suspend fun getResponse(record: String): HashMap<String, String> {}
When I call it in my main function I'm doing this, but the type of response is Job, not HashMap, how can I get the correct return type?
override fun handleRequest(event: SQSEvent?, context: Context?): Void? {
event?.records?.forEach {
try {
val response: Job = GlobalScope.launch {
getResponse(it.body)
}
} catch (ex: Exception) {
logger.error("error message")
}
}
return null
}

Answer 1

Given your answers in the comments, it looks like you're not looking for concurrency here. The best course of action would then be to just make getRequest() a regular function instead of a suspend one.
Assuming you can't change this, you need to call a suspend function from a regular one. To do so, you have several options depending on your use case:
block the current thread while you do your async stuff
make handleRequest a suspend function
make handleRequest take a CoroutineScope to start coroutines with some lifecycle controlled externally, but that means handleRequest will return immediately and the caller has to deal with the running coroutines (please don't use GlobalScope for this, it's a delicate API)
Option 2 and 3 are provided for completeness, but most likely in your context these won't work for you. So you have to block the current thread while handleRequest is running, and you can do that using runBlocking:
override fun handleRequest(event: SQSEvent?, context: Context?): Void? {
runBlocking {
// do your stuff
}
return null
}
Now what to do inside runBlocking depends on what you want to achieve.
if you want to process elements sequentially, simply call getResponse directly inside the loop:
override fun handleRequest(event: SQSEvent?, context: Context?): Void? {
runBlocking {
event?.records?.forEach {
try {
val response = getResponse(it.body)
// do something with the response
} catch (ex: Exception) {
logger.error("error message")
}
}
}
return null
}
If you want to process elements concurrently, but independently, you can use launch and put both getResponse() and the code using the response inside the launch:
override fun handleRequest(event: SQSEvent?, context: Context?): Void? {
runBlocking {
event?.records?.forEach {
launch { // coroutine scope provided by runBlocking
try {
val response = getResponse(it.body)
// do something with the response
} catch (ex: Exception) {
logger.error("error message")
}
}
}
}
return null
}
If you want to get the responses concurrently, but process all responses only when they're all done, you can use map + async:
override fun handleRequest(event: SQSEvent?, context: Context?): Void? {
runBlocking {
val responses = event?.records?.mapNotNull {
async { // coroutine scope provided by runBlocking
try {
getResponse(it.body)
} catch (ex: Exception) {
logger.error("error message")
null // if you want to still handle other responses
// you could also throw an exception otherwise
}
}
}.map { it.await() }
// do something with all responses
}
return null
}

Answer 2

You can use GlobalScope.async() instead of launch() - it returns Deferred, which is a future/promise object. You can then call await() on it to get a result of getResponse().
Just make sure not to do something like: async().await() - it wouldn't make any sense, because it would still run synchronously. If you need to run getResponse() on all event.records in parallel, then you can first go in loop and collect all deffered objects and then await on all of them.