How to get the connected peers details?

[habibrosyad]

Thanks for the amazing works.

I've just started experimenting with yorkie and stumbled upon an issue. I noticed that we can display peers accessing a document in realtime (as found in this example). However, it is limited to get the peer ids (the id which is returned by the agent on client activation).

Is there a way to get more details (perhaps the key used on activation)?

My use case is that I'm trying to build a real time text editor, similar with Google Docs. I would like to display all user names accessing the document (not just the ids). I'm thinking of putting the client's key with the user id, so that I could retrieve more details (e.g. username) later in the other connected peer sessions. However, I could not find out how to do that. Maybe I'm missing something here.

[hackerwins]

The peer awareness feature is not yet fully implemented. We were thinking about how to pass additional information of the client. Since Yorkie is not yet released to users, we are trying to design an API while implementing an example(CodePair). Do you have any good ideas?

[habibrosyad]

I've setup a demo on my experiments for this in https://habibrosyad.github.io/yorkie-js-sdk/ (Quill demo with peers), where you could set your own username with query param username in the link (otherwise it's randomly generated).

To add peer details, I use an additional meta field (basically a Map<string,string>) when creating a client. In this field you could put whatever details related with the client there. The meta then persisted during client activation and can be fetched later during the documents-watching-peer-changed event. To accommodate this I've modified the proto a bit.

This is just a rough experiment, and I'm not sure yet that this is an ideal approach. The changes that I've made for this can be seen in habibrosyad/yorkie@14ed7e1 and habibrosyad@0111683.

[hackerwins]

@habibrosyad
Thank you for explaining the experiment. Storing metadata on the client seems like a good approach. I think we may refer to this experiment and implement it.

While looking at the experiment, I was wondering how to get client meta info from WatchDocuments without calling rpc GetClients().

[habibrosyad]

@hackerwins I think I've got a better approach than the previous one. I play around with the WatchDocuments. Instead of persisting meta during client activation (and saving it in the db), I pass it as part of the WatchDocumentsRequest. The peer id and meta become the value of the event documents-watching-peer-changed (changed from list of peer ids into map of <peer id, peer meta>). Also, I removed the GetClients because it is not needed anymore.

The changes made for this can be seen here in yorkie and yorkie-js-sdk. Should I make a PR for this issue?

[hackerwins]

@habibrosyad Cool! 👍 It seems to be much lighter than the previous approach. If you create PRs(yorkie and yorkie-js-sdk), I will review it with other members.

[hackerwins]

@habibrosyad
Thanks to your help, we have added metadata to the Peer Awareness. And I am working on a related design document. Can you review the document? yorkie-team/yorkie#139

[habibrosyad]

@habibrosyad
Thanks to your help, we have added metadata to the Peer Awareness. And I am working on a related design document. Can you review the document? yorkie-team/yorkie#139

sure 👍