rxjava complete after retryWhen on completeable

Question

I'm using the retryWhen operator on a Completeable, is there a way to tell it to complete from the retry Flowable? something like this -

PublishSubject<?> retrySubject = PublishSubject.create();
public void someFunction() {
    someCompletable.retryWhen(new Function<Flowable<Throwable>, Publisher<?>>() {
        @Override
        public Publisher<?> apply(Flowable<Throwable> throwableFlowable) throws Exception {
            return throwableFlowable.flatMap(throwable -> retrySubject.toFlowable(BackpressureStrategy.MISSING));
        }
    }).subscribe();
}

public void ignoreError(){
    retrySubject.onComplete();
}

Answer 1

You can't stop a flatMap by giving it an empty source. Also every error will keep subscribing more and more observers to that subject that causes memory leak.

Use takeUntil to stop a sequence via the help of another source:

PublishProcessor<Throwable> stopProcessor = PublishProcessor.create();

source.retryWhen(errors -> 
    errors.takeUntil(
        stopProcessor
    )
    .flatMap(error -> Flowable.timer(1, TimeUnit.SECONDS))
)

stopProcessor.onComplete();

Edit If you want to reuse the same subject, you can suppress items on the stop path:

PublishProcessor<Integer> stopProcessor = PublishProcessor.create();

source.retryWhen(errors -> 
    errors.takeUntil(
        stopProcessor.ignoreElements().toFlowable()
    )
    .flatMap(error -> stopProcessor)
)

// retry
stopProcessor.onNext(1);

// stop
stopProcessor.onComplete();