How to Handle Inconsistent Data Updates in Room with Flow on Android 14?
I've been working on this all day and I'm updating my dependencies and Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy... I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm working with an scenario with using Flow from Room in my Android application, particularly when dealing with multiple sources of updates to the data. I'm using Room version 2.4.2 and Kotlin Coroutines. My database entity is set up to emit changes via a Flow, and I have a ViewModel that collects this flow to update the UI. However, I've noticed that sometimes the UI does not reflect the latest data changes, especially when one of the update sources is a background job that modifies the database directly. Here’s a simplified version of my setup: ```kotlin @Entity data class User( @PrimaryKey val id: Int, val name: String ) @Dao interface UserDao { @Query("SELECT * FROM User") fun getAllUsers(): Flow<List<User>> @Insert(onConflict = OnConflictStrategy.REPLACE) suspend fun insert(user: User) } class UserViewModel(private val userDao: UserDao) : ViewModel() { val users: LiveData<List<User>> = userDao.getAllUsers().asLiveData() } ``` I have a function that updates the database from a background job: ```kotlin fun updateUserData(user: User) { GlobalScope.launch(Dispatchers.IO) { userDao.insert(user) } } ``` The question is that when I update the user data from this method, the UI does not always reflect the changes immediately. I’ve added logging in the `insert` method of the DAO, and I see that the insert is happening, but the flow seems to be emitting stale data. I even tried invalidating the database cache using `invalidateAll()` in my `RoomDatabase` instance, but it didn’t help. I’ve ensured that there are no other threads holding onto stale instances of the data. Is there something I'm missing in the way I'm using Room with Flow? How can I ensure that the UI is always up-to-date with the latest data? Any help would be appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? For context: I'm using Kotlin on Ubuntu. This is for a microservice running on CentOS. Thanks for any help you can provide! This issue appeared after updating to Kotlin stable. What would be the recommended way to handle this?