How To Do Recursive Observable Call in RxJava?

Question

I am quite new to RxJava (and Reactive paradigm in general), so please bear with me.

Suppose I have this News and this nested Comment data

Answer 1

This does practically the same thing described in the article:

Observable<Comment> getInnerComments(Comment comment) {
    if (comment.childIds.length > 0)
        return Observable.merge(
                Observable.just(comment),
                Observable.from(comment.childIds)
                        .flatMap(id -> getComments(id))
                        .flatMap(this::getInnerComments));
    return Observable.just(comment);
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    getComments(1)
          .flatMap(this::getInnerComments)
          .subscribe(c -> System.out.println(comment.toString()));
}

I start with the comment with id = 1, then I pass it to getInnerComments(). The getInnerComments() checks if the comment has children. If it does, it iterates over every child id (Observable#from) and loads every child with your getComments(int) API. Then every child is passed to the getInnerComments() to do the same procedure. If a comment doesn't have children, it is immediately returned using Observable#just.

This is pseudo-code and it wasn't tested, but you should get the idea.

---

Below is an example of how to get all comments and then aggregate them to one List<Comment>.

getNews(99)
        .flatMap(news -> Observable.from(news.commentIds))
        .flatMap(commentId -> getComments(commentId))
        .flatMap(comment -> getInnerComments(comment))
        .toList()
        .subscribe(commentList -> { });