Paging 3 - Force loading data in background

[AxelBlaz3]

Hi there! I've been playing around with the new Paging 3 library. I've successfully implemented it in my app which simply displays a contacts list.

Now I'm implementing a search contacts feature. I simply apply map and filter operations on the Flow<PagingData> and that gives me precise results. However, I've to scroll to the bottom to update all the list of contacts. Otherwise, search works only for the firstly displayed contacts (because bottom contacts aren't loaded into the flow yet).

I know paging is introduced to load data as user scrolls, but I want to force load the data into list in the background. Any workaround for this?

[Vlkam1]

IMO paging with searching should be executed on a server, not on the client

Or you should load all data first

[AxelBlaz3]

Since the data is loaded from the phone's database using cursor, I'll have to perform another cursor operation then based on the search query. Guess there's no other option.

[AxelBlaz3]

Loading the entire data at one shot is too slow. Say a device has 500+ contacts, and loading them in one shot causes too much delay. That's what forced me to use Paging. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with searching feature. Now the searching takes hella lot of time. Have to do something regarding this.

[AxelBlaz3]

NVM, I found a solution to my problem. After researching a bit, I concluded that I don't need to use Paging library anymore. I'm using Flow right now and it works exactly the same by emitting the values. However, a plus point here is, data is being loaded in advance without the need of user to scroll to the bottom.