Allow reactivelly informing the app of changes to the account

[mitar]

For example, Sandstorm account could have handle changed. This will be send next time with next request to the app, I presume. But in Meteor, one does not really send new requests because apps are single-page apps. So some reactive way of informing the app of the change would be great. So that app can immediately respond to the handle change.

[zarvox]

We've discussed wanting to provide grains with some API they can use to subscribe to change notifications about things like grain title ( #1629 ) or user permissions ( #1709 ). I imagine other profile information like preferred-handle change would be worth supporting in whatever we implement there.

[kentonv]

I think what we want to do here is restart all sessions when session parameters change. We already do this in the case of permissions changing.

[mitar]

I think what we want to do here is restart all sessions when session parameters change. We already do this in the case of permissions changing.

Based on some bad experience with Meteor hot-reloading, I think apps should have some control in saying when this session restarting should take place and how. Otherwise users might loose their work if you reload underneath them.

So maybe a better API would be to have some way that Sandstorm informs the app of its intent to restart the session and then app decides when to do that (by reloading or something). Then this could all be done with the same API.

(Of course, changing things like title of the grain should probably not reload the session.)

[kentonv]

@mitar I'm not proposing reloading the page. I'm proposing restarting the backend session, which is a specific thing in Sandstorm infrastructure. The effect from your point of view is that the WebSocket will be reset. Meteor will automatically reconnect, but when it does, accounts-sandstorm will notice the changed user info. This is all invisible to the user.

[mitar]

Ah, so it is more like instance restart or migration of the user to a new instance. This sounds cool.

[paulproteus]

@kentonv does a session restart result in a new ephemeral hostname for the app? Just trying to make sure I understand the above.

[kentonv]

@paulproteus No, it does not.