Low-level HTTP calls with Retrofit adapters

[quilin]

What kind of issue is this?

• [ ] Feature Request. Start by telling us what problem you’re trying to solve. Often a solution already exists! Don’t send pull requests to implement new features without first getting our support. Sometimes we leave features out on purpose to keep the project small.

So we were implementing the fault-tolerance system for our Android application based on storing the low-level request data in SQLite and process the stored requests in a background. After consideration we came to the point where we will only store the method, url and body of the request, relying on our interceptors to add the API/Auth tokens.

We do not want to store the data that will rely on our code, so it is not okay for us to use the retrofit annotated API-services and instead we require low-level calls, such as:

val request = Request.Builder()
   .url(queuedRequest.url)
   .method(queuedRequest.method, queuedRequest.body.toRequestBody())

val response = retrofit.callFactory().newCall(request).execute()

It does the thing and it works correctly with all the interceptors that enrich the request with the tokens. However, we also use retrofit-specific CallAdapters we run into the issue. In our case we only use the Retry policy from resilience4j.retrofit and it is being bootstrapped by Retrofit.Builder().addCallAdapterFactory(RetryCallAdapter.of(apiRetry)). So when we call the callFactory() it returns the OkHttp low-level call factory that is oblivious to any call adapters that we have. It is not the biggest deal and we work it around with

val supplier = Retry.decorateSupplier(RemoteDataModule.apiRetry) {
   val response = retrofit.callFactory().newCall(request).execute()
   if (response.isSuccessful) {
      Response.success(response.code, response.body.toString())
   } else {
      Response.error(response.code, response.body!!)
   }
}

But of course it only looks okay-ish because we only use one call adapter, and, for example, no CircuitBreaker so far.

So the problem is - is there a way to make a low-level calls to the whole retrofit instance without using the annotated service? Is it a proper feature request?

Thanks in advance, Best regards :)

[quilin]

Any updates here? I'm willing to make a PR for this feature, or if you can suggest a proper workaround, I'd be happy :)

[quilin]

Kind semi-year reminder :D