Hello everyone, is it a bad practice to expose flo...

# coroutines

[Kirill Prybylsky]

Hello everyone, is it a bad practice to expose flow inner channel like this?

fun scan() = callbackFlow<Device> {
    deviceChannel = channel
    hardwareChecker.scanDevices()
}

[Kirill Prybylsky]

The goal is to offer from multiple places data to the same flow.

[bezrukov]

If you call scan() multiple times - only last subscription will receive updates

[Kirill Prybylsky]

@bezrukov that absolutelly fine

[Kirill Prybylsky]

@bezrukov by the way, there maybe be a lot of forever suspended channels, will be created🤔

[Dominaezzz]

Unless the scandevices method suspends, all the channels will be closed immediately. Actually an error will be thrown since you don't call awaitClose.

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

I think this is probably dangerous – like Kirill said, a new channel is going to get created every time someone collects this Flow, and they’re never going to be cleaned up. If you want to just launch a single job and publish the scan results as a Flow, you could create a channel yourself and use receiveAsFlow to turn it into a flow. However this will just round-robin the results to each collector, which is also probably not what you want. You probably want to create a BroadcastChannel to send results on and use asFlow() to expose it to your consumers.