element-web/docs/local-echo-dev.md

Local echo (developer docs)

The React SDK provides some local echo functionality to allow for components to do something quickly and fall back when it fails. This is all available in the local-echo directory within stores.

Echo is handled in EchoChambers, with GenericEchoChamber being the base implementation for all chambers. The EchoChamber class is provided as semantic access to a GenericEchoChamber implementation, such as the RoomEchoChamber (which handles echoable details of a room).

Anything that can be locally echoed will be provided by the GenericEchoChamber implementation. The echo chamber will also need to deal with external changes, and has full control over whether or not something has successfully been echoed.

An EchoContext is provided to echo chambers (usually with a matching type: RoomEchoContext gets provided to a RoomEchoChamber for example) with details about their intended area of effect, as well as manage EchoTransactions. An EchoTransaction is simply a unit of work that needs to be locally echoed.

The EchoStore manages echo chamber instances, builds contexts, and is generally less semantically accessible than the EchoChamber class. For separation of concerns, and to try and keep things tidy, this is an intentional design decision.

Note: The local echo stack uses a "whenable" pattern, which is similar to thenables and EventEmitter. Whenables are ways of actioning a changing condition without having to deal with listeners being torn down. Once the reference count of the Whenable causes garbage collection, the Whenable's listeners will also be torn down. This is accelerated by the IDestroyable interface usage.

Audit functionality

The UI supports a "Server isn't responding" dialog which includes a partial audit log-like structure to it. This is partially the reason for added complexity of EchoTransactions and EchoContexts - this information feeds the UI states which then provide direct retry mechanisms.

The EchoStore is responsible for ensuring that the appropriate non-urgent toast (lower left) is set up, where the dialog then drives through the contexts and transactions.