Characteristics, Elements, and Real-life Use Cases of Flow

The characteristics of Flow

The terminal operations of Flow (like collect) suspend a coroutine instead of blocking a thread. They also support other coroutine functionalities, such as respecting the coroutine context and handling exceptions. We can cancel flow processing, and structured concurrency is supported out of the box. The flow builder is not suspending and does not require any scope. The terminal operation suspends and builds a relation to its parent coroutine (similar to the coroutineScope function).

Example

The example below shows how the CoroutineName context is passed from collect to the lambda expression in the flow builder. It also indicates that launch cancellation also leads to proper flow processing cancellation.