Suggestion: update connection status when connection is lost

[microsoft]

Suggestion: update connection status when connection is lost

[billba]

What are you trying to accomplish?

[nicksav]

@billba I am using DirectLine as underline layer of alerts and communications. (not just bot)
When user opens a portal web page I am making him "online" and he can easily start using chat (bot) etc.
As soon as connection dropped, I want to show that user is offline now and make chat "disabled".

[billba]

(Sorry, at first I misread your code)

It's actually pretty hard to know if we've lost the connection. What does that even mean? If you're using a phone then you may gain and lose the connection on a second by second basis. We could probably all agree that it means "unable to connect over an extended period of time" if we could agree on the definition of "extended".

At this time DLJS doesn't offer a state for this. Attempting to send an activity returns an error, but clients can always retry later (as WebChat does). When listening for activities we just keep trying.

It would be interesting to define a heuristic for "offline" and add a new connection status to reflect that, and then switch back to "online" if the connection shows signs of life. But since it's not a real state, just a heuristic, we'd still want to allow you to send activities and keep trying to listen.

Before considering such a thing we'd need unit tests for DLJS, which are currently sorely lacking.

[justinwilaby]

I realize this is a very old thread but I came across this and thought I'd chime in. Of course there are APIs and Events that have existed for quite some time that tell you whether you're online or offline. It may be useful in this case at least for users that are implementing this in a browser like @nicksav

e.g.

window.addEventListener('offline', () => console.log('Aw snap!')
window.addEventListener('online', () => console.log('Yay!');

I hope this helps.

[billba]

Oh hey that's cool, I didn't know that.

[compulim]

We are tracking the resume/end conversation stories at #124.

[cwhitten]

See #124 for updates on this workstream