Managing Resources with Reactive Extensions

Reactive Extensions

While Reactive Extensions will clean up after itself, it is still your responsibility to manage limited resources, and to dispose of  any unmanaged resources.

You can, however, use a variant on the using statement with Observables.

To do so, call the static parameterized Using method on Observable.  This returns an IObservable<char> and takes two parameters. The first parameter is a Func that returns a streamReader and the second is a Func that takes the StreamReader produced by the first and returns an IObservable of char.

The template parameters are the type of Observable to be produced (in this case char) and the resource to be disposed of when the observable sequence is disposed of (in this case a stream).

var ObservableStrings =
    Observable.Using<char, StreamReader>

)

The first of the two parameters will create the streamReader and open a FileStream on a text file in the same directory as the program,

() => new StreamReader(
    new FileStream(
      "randomstrings.txt", FileMode.Open)),

The second parameter uses the streamReader just created, and reads through the stream to the end (creating a string array). That array is then turned into an observable by calling ToObservable on it,

streamReader =>
(
    from str in streamReader.ReadToEnd()
    select str
)
.ToObservable()

We can then subscribe to the newly created ObsevableStrings and display the strings found in the text document. Here is the complete program,

class Program
{
    static void Main( string[ ] args )
    {
        var ObservableStrings =
             Observable.Using<char, StreamReader>
        (
            () => new StreamReader(
               new FileStream(
                     "randomstrings.txt",
                     FileMode.Open ) ),
            streamReader =>
            (
                from str in streamReader.ReadToEnd()
                select str
            )
            .ToObservable()
        );

        ObservableStrings.Subscribe( Console.Write );

    }
}

If you place this in a console application in Visual Studio, but sure to use NuGet to obtain the Reactive Extension libraries.  In addition, you’ll need a text file in the …\bin\debug directory named randomstrings.txt with text in it.