Retrying tasks with Flow

In this section, we will explore Kotlin Flow retrying. There are cases when retrying an operation is needed for your application.

When performing long-running tasks, such as a network call, sometimes it is necessary to try the call again. This includes cases such as logging in/out, posting data, or even fetching data. The user may be in an area with a low internet connection, or there may be other factors why the call is failing. With Kotlin Flows, we have the retry and retryWhen operators that we can use to retry Flows automatically.

The retry operator allows you to set a Long retries as the maximum number of times the Flow will retry. You can also set a predicate condition, a code block that will retry the Flow when it returns true. The predicate has a Throwable parameter representing the exception that occurred; you can use that to check whether you want to do the retry or not.

The following example shows how we can use the retry Flow operator...