I'm looking to wait for a coroutine to finish befo...

# android

[Justin Yue]

I'm looking to wait for a coroutine to finish before continuing with some other processes. From what I've found in Kotlin and Android documentation, async would be my best bet since it returns a Deferred that "represents a promise to provide a result later." However, I am not looking to wait for a result to be return. While I know I could probably return a dummy value (probably a boolean to represent the coroutine finished), are there any other alternatives to async?

[louiscad]

Just make the function suspend.

[Justin Yue]

Code:
suspend fun extractTextFromFilePath(filePath: String): Boolean {
// code
}

class CameraViewModel(val context: Context): ViewModel() {
private var textBlocks = mutableMapOf<String, Array<Point?>>()

val textBlockString
get() = textBlocks.toString()

fun extractText(filePath: String): String {
viewModelScope.launch {
imageAnalyzer.extractTextFromFilePath(filePath)
}
Log.d(TAG, textBlockString)
return extractedText
}

}

[Justin Yue]

I changed my extractTextFromFilePath() function to a suspend function and ran it in the viewModelScope, but when I check my logs, textBlockString is an empty string. If I were to run it a little while later, I can see that the textBlocksString is no longer an empty string

[Justin Yue]

I plan to process textBlocksString, so how can I ensure that I run the other processing when `textBlocksString`has been properly updated by extractTextFromFilePath()