I am using rxjava2 for the first time on an Android project, and am doing SQL queries on a background thread.
However I am having trouble figuring out the best way to do a simple SQL query, and being able to handle the case where the record may or may not exist. Here is the code I am using:
public Observable<Record> createRecordObservable(int id) {
Callable<Record> callback = new Callable<Record>() {
@Override
public Record call() throws Exception {
// do the actual sql stuff, e.g.
// select * from Record where id = ?
return record;
}
};
return Observable.fromCallable(callback).subscribeOn(Schedulers.computation());
}
This works well when there is a record present. But in the case of a non-existent record matching the id, it treats it like an error. Apparently this is because rxjava2 doesn't allow the Callable to return a null.
Obviously I don't really want this. An error should be only if the database failed or something, whereas a empty result is perfectly valid. I read somewhere that one possible solution is wrapping Record in a Java 8 Optional, but my project is not Java 8, and anyway that solution seems a bit ugly.
This is surely such a common, everyday task that I'm sure there must be a simple and easy solution, but I couldn't find one so far. What is the recommended pattern to use here?