Newbie question: when querying a database using a ...

# flow

[Daniel Ryan]

Newbie question: when querying a database using a reactive driver, what are the advantages and differences in behaviour when returning a flow from a repository function, as opposed to returning a list from a suspend function?

[krzysztof]

With a function approach, you have to call the function yourself to get the latest data from database. With Flow, your UI will automatically update when something changes within that db query

[krzysztof]

so with Flow, the advantage is that you don’t have to remember to call getLatestDBEntries to keep your UI up to date

[Daniel Ryan]

Thanks. Some additional information: this is for a backend rest service that will not support polling. I was looking the example from https://www.baeldung.com/kotlin/spring-boot-kotlin-coroutines and I could not work out a reason why the repo returns a flow rather than a list from a suspend function in this example? As it is not using the repo for live updates, is there and reason/advantage to returning a flow in this example?

[krzysztof]

I’m not familiar with Flux class here, but if I would have to guess, getAllProducts does not return a list - rather it’s an emitter of each item found. Probably that’s why Flow was used here

[krzysztof]

Quick search told me that Flux is part of WebFlux - reactive framework. That solves the mystery 😄