Example
The flatMap operator help you to transform one event to another Observable (or transform an event to zero, one, or more events).
It's a perfect operator when you want to call another method which return an Observable
public Observable<String> perform(int i) {
// ...
}
Observable.just(1, 2, 3)
.flatMap(i -> perform(i))
.subscribe(result -> System.out.println("result ->" + result);
flatMap will serialize perform subscriptions but events emited by perform may not be ordered. So you may receive events emitted by the last perform call before events from the first perform call (you should use concatMap instead).
If your creating another Observable in your subscriber, you should use flatMap instead. The main idea is : never leave the Observable
For example :
Observable.just(1, 2, 3)
.subscribe(i -> perform(i));
can easily be replaced by :
Observable.just(1, 2, 3)
.flatMap(i -> perform(i))
.subscribe();
Reactivex.io documentation : http://reactivex.io/documentation/operators/flatmap.html
