Shapes Not Properly Unsubscribed on Logout or Session Termination

[gartz]

Use Case

When a user logs out or their session is terminated, all shape subscriptions are expected to be unsubscribed.

Expected Behavior

1. Active long polling requests should be aborted when the user logs out.
2. Shapes should stop fetching data immediately, as there are no active subscriptions.

Current Behavior

1. The long polling request remains active until it either receives data or times out.
2. New fetch attempts continue until the server eventually returns an error.

Implications

• If the long polling request completes and sends data after logout, the client may receive and process unauthorized or incorrect information.
• The proxy/server can become unnecessarily busy handling rejected requests due to lost session permissions.

Proposed Solution

1. On unsubscribeAll, immediately disconnect the shape.
2. Implement a dedicated method to explicitly disconnect a shape.

Recommended Approach

The best solution would be to send an abort signal to immediately stop pending long polling requests when unsubscribing.

A new subscription should be able to restart the shape synchronization with the backend as needed.

[KyleAMathews]

Hey @gartz — have you see the signal option for ShapeStream (also accepted in useShape, etc) https://electric-sql.com/docs/api/clients/typescript#options ?

electric/packages/typescript-client/src/client.ts

Lines 281 to 293 in 4e9b9be

	* To abort the stream, abort the `signal`
	* passed in via the `ShapeStreamOptions`.
	* ```
	* const aborter = new AbortController()
	* const issueStream = new ShapeStream({
	* url: `${BASE_URL}/${table}`
	* subscribe: true,
	* signal: aborter.signal,
	* })
	* // Later...
	* aborter.abort()
	* ```
	*/

You could e.g. have a shared AbortController that's passed to all shape subscriptions that you then cancel when logging someone out.

[gartz]

thanks, that's what I end-up using to solve this problem. But it got the code quite complex because of React and PgLite. Having a way to do without need to pass the signal could improve a lot easy of use. Even a method such as "abort()" could do it, and it could be called along with the unsubscribeAll.