Implementing Custom Operators in RxJava

Last updated: January 8, 2024

Written by: baeldung

Reviewed by: Grzegorz Piwowarek

Reactive

RxJava

Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.

Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.

Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.

Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.

Regression testing is an important step in the release process, to ensure that new code doesn't break the existing functionality. As the codebase evolves, we want to run these tests frequently to help catch any issues early on.

The best way to ensure these tests run frequently on an automated basis is, of course, to include them in the CI/CD pipeline. This way, the regression tests will execute automatically whenever we commit code to the repository.

In this tutorial, we'll see how to create regression tests using Selenium, and then include them in our pipeline using GitHub Actions:, to be run on the LambdaTest cloud grid:

>> How to Run Selenium Regression Tests With GitHub Actions

1. Overview

In this quick tutorial, we’ll show how to write a custom operator using RxJava.

We’ll discuss how to build this simple operator, as well as a transformer – both as a class or as a simple function.

2. Maven Configuration

First, we need to make sure we have the rxjava dependency in pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.reactivex</groupId>
    <artifactId>rxjava</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.0</version>
</dependency>

We can check the latest version of rxjava on Maven Central.

3. Custom Operator

We can create our custom operator by implementing Operator interface, in the following example we implemented a simple operator for removing non-alphanumeric characters from a String:

public class ToCleanString implements Operator<String, String> {

    public static ToCleanString toCleanString() {
        return new ToCleanString();
    }

    private ToCleanString() {
        super();
    }

    @Override
    public Subscriber<? super String> call(final Subscriber<? super String> subscriber) {
        return new Subscriber<String>(subscriber) {
            @Override
            public void onCompleted() {
                if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                    subscriber.onCompleted();
                }
            }

            @Override
            public void onError(Throwable t) {
                if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                    subscriber.onError(t);
                }
            }

            @Override
            public void onNext(String item) {
                if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                    final String result = item.replaceAll("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "");
                    subscriber.onNext(result);
                }
            }
        };
    }
}

In the above example, we need to check if the subscriber is subscribed before applying our operation and emitting the item to it as it will be unnecessary.

We are also restricting instance creation only to static factory methods to achieve a more user-friendly readability when chaining methods and using the static import.

And now, we can use lift operator to chain our custom operator easily with other operators:

observable.lift(toCleanString())....

Here is a simple test of our custom operator:

@Test
public void whenUseCleanStringOperator_thenSuccess() {
    List<String> list = Arrays.asList("john_1", "tom-3");
    List<String> results = new ArrayList<>();
    Observable<String> observable = Observable
      .from(list)
      .lift(toCleanString());
    observable.subscribe(results::add);

    assertThat(results, notNullValue());
    assertThat(results, hasSize(2));
    assertThat(results, hasItems("john1", "tom3"));
}

4. Transformer

We can also create our operator by implementing Transformer interface:

public class ToLength implements Transformer<String, Integer> {

    public static ToLength toLength() {
        return new ToLength();
    }

    private ToLength() {
        super();
    }

    @Override
    public Observable<Integer> call(Observable<String> source) {
        return source.map(String::length);
    }
}

Note that we use the transformer toLength to transform our observable from String to its length in Integer.

We will need a compose operator to use our transformer:

observable.compose(toLength())...

Here is a simple test:

@Test
public void whenUseToLengthOperator_thenSuccess() {
    List<String> list = Arrays.asList("john", "tom");
    List<Integer> results = new ArrayList<>();
    Observable<Integer> observable = Observable
      .from(list)
      .compose(toLength());
    observable.subscribe(results::add);

    assertThat(results, notNullValue());
    assertThat(results, hasSize(2));
    assertThat(results, hasItems(4, 3));
}

The lift(Operator) operates on observable’s subscribers but compose(Transformer) work on the observable itself.

When we create our custom operator, we should pick Transformer if we want to operate on the observable as a whole and choose Operator if we want to operate on the items emitted by the observable

5. Custom Operator as a Function

We can implement our custom operator as a function instead of public class :

Operator<String, String> cleanStringFn = subscriber -> {
    return new Subscriber<String>(subscriber) {
        @Override
        public void onCompleted() {
            if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                subscriber.onCompleted();
            }
        }

        @Override
        public void onError(Throwable t) {
            if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                subscriber.onError(t);
            }
        }

        @Override
        public void onNext(String str) {
            if (!subscriber.isUnsubscribed()) {
                String result = str.replaceAll("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "");
                subscriber.onNext(result);
            }
        }
    };
};

And here’s the simple test:

List<String> results = new ArrayList<>();
Observable.from(Arrays.asList("ap_p-l@e", "or-an?ge"))
  .lift(cleanStringFn)
  .subscribe(results::add);

assertThat(results, notNullValue());
assertThat(results, hasSize(2));
assertThat(results, hasItems("apple", "orange"));

Similarly for Transformer example:

@Test
public void whenUseFunctionTransformer_thenSuccess() {
    Transformer<String, Integer> toLengthFn = s -> s.map(String::length);

    List<Integer> results = new ArrayList<>();
    Observable.from(Arrays.asList("apple", "orange"))
      .compose(toLengthFn)
      .subscribe(results::add);

    assertThat(results, notNullValue());
    assertThat(results, hasSize(2));
    assertThat(results, hasItems(5, 6));
}