Android Architecture Components network threads

Question

I'm currently checking out the following guide: https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/guide.html

The networkBoundResource class:

// ResultType: Type for the Resource data
// RequestType: Type for the API response
public abstract class NetworkBoundResource<ResultType, RequestType> {
    // Called to save the result of the API response into the database
    @WorkerThread
    protected abstract void saveCallResult(@NonNull RequestType item);

    // Called with the data in the database to decide whether it should be
    // fetched from the network.
    @MainThread
    protected abstract boolean shouldFetch(@Nullable ResultType data);

    // Called to get the cached data from the database
    @NonNull @MainThread
    protected abstract LiveData<ResultType> loadFromDb();

    // Called to create the API call.
    @NonNull @MainThread
    protected abstract LiveData<ApiResponse<RequestType>> createCall();

    // Called when the fetch fails. The child class may want to reset components
    // like rate limiter.
    @MainThread
    protected void onFetchFailed() {
    }

    // returns a LiveData that represents the resource
    public final LiveData<Resource<ResultType>> getAsLiveData() {
        return result;
    }
}

I'm a bit confused here about the use of threads.
Why is @MainThread applied here for networkIO?
Also, for saving into the db, @WorkerThread is applied, whereas @MainThread for retrieving results.

Is it bad practise to use a worker thread by default for NetworkIO and local db interaction?

I'm also checking out the following demo (GithubBrowserSample): https://github.com/googlesamples/android-architecture-components
This confuses me from a threading point of view.
The demo uses executors framework, and defines a fixed pool with 3 threads for networkIO, however in the demo only a worker task is defined for one call, i.e. the FetchNextSearchPageTask. All other network requests seem to be executed on the main thread.

Can someone clarify the rationale?

Answer 1

It seems you have a few misconceptions.

Generally it is never OK to call network from the Main (UI) thread but unless you have a lot of data it might be OK to fetch data from DB in the Main thread. And this is what Google example does.

1.

The demo uses executors framework, and defines a fixed pool with 3 threads for networkIO, however in the demo only a worker task is defined for one call, i.e. the FetchNextSearchPageTask.

First of all, since Java 8 you can create simple implementation of some interfaces (so called "functional interfaces") using lambda syntax. This is what happens in the NetworkBoundResource:

            appExecutors.diskIO().execute(() -> {
                saveCallResult(processResponse(response));
                appExecutors.mainThread().execute(() ->
                        // we specially request a new live data,
                        // otherwise we will get immediately last cached value,
                        // which may not be updated with latest results received from network.
                        result.addSource(loadFromDb(),
                                newData -> result.setValue(Resource.success(newData)))
                );
            });

at first task (processResponse and saveCallResult) is scheduled on a thread provided by the diskIO Executor and then from that thread the rest of the work is scheduled back to the Main thread.

2.

Why is @MainThread applied here for networkIO?

and

All other network requests seem to be executed on the main thread.

This is not so. Only result wrapper i.e. LiveData<ApiResponse<RequestType>> is created on the main thread. The network request is done on a different thread. This is not easy to see because Retrofit library is used to do all the network-related heavy lifting and it nicely hides such implementation details. Still, if you look at the LiveDataCallAdapter that wraps Retrofit into a LiveData, you can see that Call.enqueue is used which is actually an asynchronous call (scheduled internally by Retrofit).

Actually if not for "pagination" feature, the example would not need networkIO Executor at all. "Pagination" is a complicated feature and thus it is implemented using explicit FetchNextSearchPageTask and this is a place where I think Google example is done not very well: FetchNextSearchPageTask doesn't re-use request parsing logic (i.e. processResponse) from RepoRepository but just assumes that it is trivial (which it is now, but who knows about the future...). Also there is no scheduling of the merging job onto the diskIO Executor which is also inconsistent with the rest of the response processing.