Stop publishing when there are no subscribers and auto start when there are subscribers

Question

How would I implement a RACSignal that would stop publishing when there are no subscribers to it and auto start when there are subscribers?

Here is a scenario:

Let us say I have a currentLocationSignal in the AppDelegate. My LocationViewController would subscribe to the currentLocationSignal when view loads and unsubscribe (dispose) when view unloads. Since it takes few seconds to get the current location, I would like to always subscribe to the currentLocationSignal when the app opens (and auto unsubscribe after few seconds), so by the time I arrive to LocationViewController I would get an accurate location. So there can be more then one subscribers to the signal. When the first subscriber listens, it needs to start calling startUpdatingLocation and when there are no subscribers it needs to call stopUpdatingLocation.

Answer 1

Good question! Normally, you'd use RACMulticastConnection for use cases like this, but, because you want the signal to be able to reactivate later, a connection isn't suitable on its own.

The simplest answer is probably to mimic how a connection works, but with the specific behaviors you want. Basically, we'll keep track of how many subscribers there are at any given time, and start/stop updating the location based on that number.

Let's start by adding a locationSubject property. The subject needs to be a RACReplaySubject, because we always want new subscribers to get the most recently sent location immediately. Implementing updates with that subject is easy enough:

- (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didUpdateLocations:(NSArray *)locations {
    [self.locationSubject sendNext:locations.lastObject];
}

Then, we want to implement the signal that tracks and increments/decrements the subscriber count. This works by using a numberOfLocationSubscribers integer property:

- (RACSignal *)currentLocationSignal {
    return [RACSignal createSignal:^(id<RACSubscriber> subscriber) {
        @synchronized (self) {
            if (self.numberOfLocationSubscribers == 0) {
                [self.locationManager startUpdatingLocation];
            }

            ++self.numberOfLocationSubscribers;
        }

        [self.locationSubject subscribe:subscriber];

        return [RACDisposable disposableWithBlock:^{
            @synchronized (self) {
                --self.numberOfLocationSubscribers;
                if (self.numberOfLocationSubscribers == 0) {
                    [self.locationManager stopUpdatingLocation];
                }
            }
        }];
    }];
}

In the above code, the +createSignal: block is invoked every time a new subscriber is added to the returned signal. When that happens:

1. We check to see if the number of subscribers is currently zero. If so, the just-added subscriber is the first one, so we need to enable (or re-enable) location updates.
2. We hook the subscriber directly up to our locationSubject, so the values from the latter are automatically fed into the former.
3. Then, at some future time, when the subscription is disposed of, we decrement the count and stop location updates if appropriate.

Now, all that's left is subscribing to the currentLocationSignal on startup, and automatically unsubscribing after a few seconds:

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions {
    // Use a capacity of 1 because we only ever care about the latest
    // location.
    self.locationSubject = [RACReplaySubject replaySubjectWithCapacity:1];

    [[self.currentLocationSignal
        takeUntil:[RACSignal interval:3]]
        subscribeCompleted:^{
            // We don't actually need to do anything here, but we need
            // a subscription to keep the location updating going for the
            // time specified.
        }];

    return YES;
}

This subscribes to self.currentLocationSignal immediately, and then automatically disposes of that subscription when the +interval: signal sends its first value.

Interestingly, -[RACMulticastConnection autoconnect] used to behave like -currentLocationSignal above, but that behavior was changed because it makes side effects wildly unpredictable. This use case should be safe, but there are other times (like when making a network request or running a shell command) when automatic reconnection would be horrible.