Hey, I'm launching a long-running coroutine in som...

# coroutines

[Jakub Walusiak]

Hey, I'm launching a long-running coroutine in some scope. Is there a way to obtain its Job from my scope later (e.g by marking it in some way)?

[Jakub Walusiak]

I tried creating a wrapper class class JobMarker(parent: Job?) : Job by Job(parent), but that doesn't register JobMarker as child and thus cannot be retrieved

[diesieben07]

launch allows you to pass in your own CoroutineContext. You should be able to put in your own CoroutineContext.Key and then obtain it again later.

[Jakub Walusiak]

that seems nice, but how can I retreive this child context from parent scope?

[diesieben07]

The "parent scope" is a CoroutineScope, right? If so, get it's Job (every CoroutineScope should have one!): scope.coroutineContext[Job]. Then search through that Job's children using job.children

[Jakub Walusiak]

yeah, but how to select one specific Job from all children?

[diesieben07]

You have to find it, by checking if it has your marker key (CoroutineContext.Key

[diesieben07]

Notice that Job is itself a CoroutineContext, so it will have your key in it

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

launch returns the Job of the child, why can’t you just store that? It would be a lot simpler than writing all this search logic.

[Jakub Walusiak]

I didn't notice that job itself is a CoroutineContext , thanks

[Jakub Walusiak]

@Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD] sure, but I am wondering if there's another way

[Jakub Walusiak]

because that would be duplicating something that is already stored in CoroutineContext

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Parents needing references to their child jobs is a common use case – that’s presumably the whole reason why the launch API was designed the way it was, to return the child’s Job. Using the existing API means you need to write less code (fewer potential bugs) and makes your code’s intent much more obvious than going out of your way to write a bunch of search logic just to avoid creating a variable.

[Jakub Walusiak]

i won't disagree with that, i'm just looking for spicier way to do it

[Jakub Walusiak]

@Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD] here's funny thing, this actually doesn't work and I have no idea why

[Jakub Walusiak]

class JobMarker(val id: String) : CoroutineContext.Element {
    override val key = Key

    companion object Key : CoroutineContext.Key<JobMarker>
}

fun main() = runBlocking {
    launch(JobMarker("a")) { suspendCoroutine {  } }

    println(coroutineContext[Job]!!.children.first { it[JobMarker]?.id == "a" })
}

[Jakub Walusiak]

this will actually throw an error due to no JobMarker key

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Job.children returns a list of the job’s child jobs, not their complete contexts.

CoroutineContext is basically just a strongly-typed Map<Key, Element>, where the types of each entry’s keys and values are linked. When you pass a CoroutineContext to launch, you’re saying “take the current context, add all the entries from the new context to it (existing keys are “overwritten”), and use that as the context for the new coroutine”. So in your example, the child coroutine you launch has a context that looks something like this:

mapOf(
  Job.Key to Job(parent = coroutineContext[Job]),
  JobMarker.Key to JobMarker("a")
)

(there’s some other stuff too, like the dispatcher, but that’s not relevant here)

Jobs form a hierarchy, but that hierarchy only includes the jobs themselves, not the entire context. I think the reason for the confusion is that it looks a bit strange that a Job “is a” CoroutineContext. This doesn’t mean the Job contains the whole context, it’s just how the api works, so that, for example, you can pass an instance of Job to a function that takes a context and not need a bunch of job.asCoroutineContext methods everywhere, and so that the + operator can be defined for all of them. All `Job`s are `CoroutineContext`s, not all `CoroutineContext`s are `Job`s.

[Jakub Walusiak]

thanks, that explains a lot

[Jakub Walusiak]

to sum up, there's no way to access "child" contexts from "parent" context because there's no such relation?

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

As far as I know, yes.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

That said, if you step through your code in the debugger, you might notice that your child jobs are instances of StandaloneCoroutine, which is a private class in the coroutines library that both implements Job and has a reference to the current and parent `CoroutineContext`s. This can be useful for debugging, but I would be extremely wary of trying to access this stuff programmatically via reflection or something, since it’s a private implementation detail and could change at any time without notice.

[Jakub Walusiak]

thanks