how to tell zip operator to execute observables one after another ? about rxjava-android-samples

[kaushikgopal]

hmm.. so there are a couple of approaches I would suggest

1. throttling your network requests by issuing them at spaced intervals which the stackoverflow answer suggests (either using interval or delay
2. Another suggestion: what if you force all your multiple network requests to work on the same background thread? They would technically block each other right?

I haven't tried any of the approaches above, but i'll try to give it a shot in the weekend.

[kaushikgopal]

So i couldn't stop thinking about this and decided to try a bunch of things anyway. In the process of my experiementation and looking at possible solutions online, I came across another Stack Overflow post answer by James World who is far more knowledgeable than I. Check it out here. For the sake of people reading this, here's a summary of the possible solutions:

1. Don't force the use of RxJava. Just send out the network calls serially one after the other, in a background thread and be done with your problem :P.
2. If your observables are of the same type, and you REALLY want to use RxJava, concat is the way to go. It's almost exactly what you ask for.
3. subscribing to them all on a single thread as i suggested but with the caveat that this isn't guaranteed to work (because it's quite common for subscribe methods to return before an operator has actually finished).
4. fake flatmap - shoot out your next call onComplete of first call (but at this point, you really are coercing Rx to do something it's fundamentally built against doing).

I would honestly just go with approach 1 cause it's the simpler + clean approach. Just make sure you're on a background thread (in Android) when executing those calls.

I'm going to go ahead and close this issue, cause I think it provides multiple solutions to your question. Feel free to reopen it if you feel there's more to explore, but the use case-while completely valid-is not one best suited for RxJava (imho).