MediaConnection.close() does not invoke remote peer's close method

[samhirtarif]

Issue

The problem is straight forward, when a local peer calls the close method on MediaConnection, the remote peer is not informed in any way, which results in the remote peer's close method not being invoked and the MediaConnection on the remote peer's end staying open indefinitely until they close it themselves.

Proposed resolution

The MDN docs have a guide on Signaling and video calling that has a section for "HANGING UP" a call. The way they have shown the implementation should be is that the user that hang's up should send a message to the remote peer through a server that they've hung up.

Screen shot from MDN docs

This gave me the idea of introducing a similar pattern to the peerjs implementation. Which is, introducing a HangUp message in the ServerMessageType enum, that is sent to the remote peer from the cleanup method in the Negotiator class. The remote peer would then invoke their own close method when they receive this message.

Introducing this message type would also require us to handle this message on the peerjs-server end by registering a handler in the handlersRegistry presumably.

TL;DR for Proposed resolution

Signal to the remote peer through a new ServerMessageType called HangUp when the local peer calls the close method, the remote peer would invoke their own close method on receiving this message. This would also require changes on peerjs-server to add a message handler for the new message type.


This is a solution that I have been working on and I just wanted to get opinions and recommendations from the peerjs core development team on this too! Thanks in advance! 😃

[samhirtarif]

Update: I've tried out the proposed solution and it works.
@jonasgloning - any suggestions or recommendations? Or should I go ahead with creating pull requests for both repos?

[jonasgloning]

Thanks for pinging me @samhirtarif, and sorry for getting to this so late.

Your solution will work, but I'm still a bit hesitant, as the current expectation might be that you can .disconnect() from the server and still have all functionality for existing connections.
Someone else proposed a separate DataChannel as a way to transfer the hang-up message.

I'll search if there is a way without a separate channel. I'll get back to you soon.

[samhirtarif]

@jonasgloning - Thank your for taking the time to respond to this
When you say ".disconnect() from the server" is that disconnection from the peerjs socket server?
And I'll be waiting to hear back from you, will try to find other ways too to fix this

[github-actions]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 1.5.0-rc.1 🎉

The release is available on:

• npm package (@rc dist-tag)
• GitHub release

Your semantic-release bot 📦🚀

[jonasgloning]

Hey @samhirtarif, this should be fixed in version v1.5 (just published) via an auxiliary data channel.
This way you can disconnect from the peerjs socket server and still retain all functionality for existing connections.