Google has recently improved their Android library arsenal. They introduced Room Persistence Library that provides easy to deal with layer over SQLite. Introduction of Room had in mind that Android world is asynchronous and reactive code grows in popularity.

TL;DR: In your Room’s table Dao, return Flowable<List<SomeEntity>> that will stream data of specified Query each time database is updated.

If you were writing some app that uses database, you probably experienced design problems over database changes and updates. You had to worry each time database table has been updated, pull data over and update your UI. Room simplifies all of that to reactive stream that acts like “database update listener” which streams contents of database after every update. We’re going to implement it to make our lives easier.

I’m going to use Kotlin, RxJava2 and Room of course.

1. Setting up dependencies in module gradle file.

Make sure to check out if there is newer version available.

2. Setting up Entities.

Here you can set up list of columns in the table you are going to use in your database. Some member has to be @PrimaryKey. You can auto increment primary keys if they are Integer type adding @PrimaryKey(autoGenerate = true). Room requires default constructor, thats why I had to add default value to each parameter.

3. Setting up Dao.

Here you can list all database queries that you are going to use for specific table.

Simple @Insert @Update, @Delete or custom @Query annotation will generate all SQLite boilerplate for you. In @Update and @Insert you can specify what happens during conflict. I’m using REPLACE. Note that, Room will not compile if you make a typo, so that’s great! In my version of Room there is a problem with referencing arguments in Query by name, but you can reference them by index, arg0 arg1 and so on. 4. Setting up Database class.

All you need to do here is connect all your Daos and Entities and that’s it, Room will generate all of the code for you. Implementation of specific classes are made with _Impl postfix(ex. ItemsDatabase_Impl).

5. Usage.

You can create Database object using Application Context, I’m injecting it with Dagger2 in top level component, but you can just create it in Application onCreate() for it to be Singleton.

Your dao instances are accessible through database object.

The next usage step is just subscribing to Flowable stream provided by Room, note that in RxRoom class, subscribeOn() is already called with background thread, so now you can just add observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread()), for your data to be caught in the main thread. Important thing is that, Room will stream empty list if database is empty or if it haven’t found any data with specified query.

6. Why Flowable?

Google Developers had in mind that SQLite databases are updated in much shorter periods of time than Android UI is. Flowable adds option to handle backpressure, in short: when there are too many database updates to handle, only most recent update will be emitted through our reactive stream.

Full example is available here: RxRoom example