Syncing File Name for Drive Realtime Document

Question

My real-time document allows the user to edit the file name within the editor (much like Google's own apps). I represent this as a collaborative string so all collaborators see the file renames as soon as possible.

I'm trying to determined the best and most efficient way to keep this collaborative string in sync with the actual file name. There are two scenarios to consider:

In Editor Changes

If a user edits the document name within the editor. In this case we need to use the Drive API to push that change out to the file on Google drive. To avoid race conditions, it is best if only one of the collaborators pushes the change out. The easiest way to do this seems to check if the rename event was local.

I also found it best to add a delay so we are not pushing the rename out to the Drive API with every character change. If a few seconds pass with no more name changes at that point it pushes the change out. This all seems to work well.

External Changes

The harder one and the one I am interested in requesting advice on, the case when the file name is changed externally. For example, if the user renamed the file within the Drive interface itself. We want this change to update our collaborative string to match.

My application is entirely client-side so I can't use webhook push notifications. So my only solution is to poll the file name every X seconds (currently set to 10). But this presents the following problems:

• It is API intensive. If you have 4 collaborators that keep the screen open for 8 hour that is 11520 API calls. If my app has lots of users with lots of documents I could see how this might push me past my API limits.
• To avoid race conditions (and reduce API calls) we only want one collaborator to check for changes and update the collaborative string if the file name has changed. But how to pick when collaborators might join/exit at any time? Currently I am having each collaborator check anytime the collaborators change if they are the "leader". The "leader" is the collaborator whose session id is the highest. This seems to work but it all seems fairly hackey. Also if collaborators join close together I wonder if it might be possible that a race condition would cause multiple collaborators to think they are the leader.

Is there an easier way? An real-time API function I am missing?

It would be ideal if the real-time API just provided a method that stored the document name. Anytime the real-time API checks for mutations it could grab the latest document name.

Answer 1

I think you've identified the options. There isn't any built in functionality currently to sync it via the Realtime API specifically.

Personally I'd probably back off the poll time a lot.. its probably not critical that the title is always exactly up to date, so asking every few minutes is probably sufficient and would greatly reduce your qps.

In terms of identifying a "leader", I can't think of anything better than something deterministic based on the session id. So long as each rechecks on each session join/leave event, I don't think there should be any issues.