i am curious if there is a better way to run a “fireAndForget” action on the items in a flow as an intermediary step e.g in a repository

suspend inline fun <T>Flow<T>.fireAndForget(crossinline block: (T) -> Unit): Flow<T> {
    coroutineScope {
        launch {
            runCatching {
                collect {
                    block(it)
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return this
}

fun <T> Flow<T>.fireAndForget(
    block: (T) -> Unit
): Flow<T> = onEach { emission -> runCatching { block(emission) } }

should do the trick

thank you @flosch that looks very nice 🙏

onEach

doesn't collect anything, you still have to run

launchIn(someScope)

after it

@bezrukov looking at the source of

onEach

it runs

unsafeTransform

which collects the flow and applies the given transformation, so

launchIn

is not necessary especially if this extension is run as an intermediary step (before the flow is emitted downstream)

yes, that's correct if it is intermediate step. In your initial snippet, it was terminal operator

yes it was a terminal “fireAndForget” action, i got away with it by returning the initial flow, but i much prefer the snippet by florian