How to make several synchronuous call of rxjava Single - kotlin

Question

I have difficulties making sequential calls of RxJava Single observerable. What I mean is that I have a function that makes http request using retrofit that returns a Single.
fun loadFriends(): Single<List<Friend>> {
Log.d("msg" , "make http request")
return webService.getFriends()
}
and if I subscribe from several places at the same time:
loadFriends().subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()).subscribe()
loadFriends().subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()).subscribe()
I want that loadFriends() makes only one https request but in this case I have two http request
I know how to solve this problem in blocking way:
The solution is to make loadFriends() blocking.
private val lock = Object()
prival var inMemoryCache: List<Friends>? = null
fun loadFriends(): Single<List<Friend>> {
return Single.fromCallable {
if(inMemoryCache == null) {
synchronize(lock) {
if(inMemoryCache == null) {
inMemoryCache = webService.getFriends().blockingGet()
}
}
}
inMemoryCache
}
But I want to solve this problem in a reactive way

Answer 1

You can remedy this by creating one common source for all your consumers to subscribe to, and that source will have the cache() operator invoked against it. The effect of this operator is that the first subscriber's subscription will be delegated downstream (i.e. the network request will be invoked), and subsequent subscribers will see internally cached results produced as a result of that first subscription.
This might look something like this:
class Friends {
private val friendsSource by lazy { webService.getFriends().cache() }
fun someFunction() {
// 1st subscription - friends will be fetched from network
friendsSource
.subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
.subscribe()
// 2nd subscription - friends will be fetched from internal cache
friendsSource
.subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
.subscribe()
}
}
Note that the cache is indefinite, so if periodically refreshing the list of friends is important you'll need to come up with a way to do so.