Publish A Snapshot On Taking The Role

Edge-triggered publishers have nothing to say about the past

A source-of-truth participant publishes by watching its own state and reacting to changes: an item transition, a play/pause, a seek, a queue edit. Each of those is a collector over a flow with distinctUntilChanged on it, and that is the right shape — it is also why the group can start completely empty.

Someone who was already playing when they opened the session produces no change at all. Nothing transitions, nothing toggles, so none of the watchers fire, and every follower waits for a command that only arrives if the source happens to touch its transport. Two level-triggered publishers close the gap:

// adapted — names generalized
private suspend fun publishOnTakingTheRole() {
    room.map { it.inRoom && it.isSource }.distinctUntilChanged()
        .collect { isSource -> if (isSource) publishSnapshot() }
}

private suspend fun publishWhenSomeoneArrives() {
    room.map { it.members.size }.distinctUntilChanged()
        .collect { count ->
            val state = room.value
            if (state.inRoom && state.isSource && count > 1) publishSnapshot()
        }
}

Traps

A relay that remembers the session's last state only remembers what it was told. "The server keeps the room state" is not a substitute for the snapshot: it keeps the last command, and before the first command there is nothing to keep. A member approved before the source has issued one joins an empty session, which is why the second publisher above exists alongside the first.

A snapshot is usually more than one command, because the item-change command does not carry play state. Protocols commonly reset the running flag on an item change — the relay stamps its own default rather than the source pausing — so a snapshot that sends only "now playing X" hands every follower a loaded, silent item. Send the item, then send the explicit play-or-pause as its own command. Get this wrong and the symptom is precise and misleading: followers load the right thing and sit there stopped. The companion lesson is server-default-overrides-client-intent.

Read the intent flag for that second command, not the observed one. At the moment a snapshot is taken the local player may be mid-load, reporting "not playing" while fully committed to playing. A snapshot built from the observed flag broadcasts a pause the source never asked for — see intent-flag-not-observed-state.

The snapshot must write the same bookkeeping the change publishers read. The item-change publisher skips an item it has already published, using a lastPublished… field. If the snapshot does not set that field, the very next emission from the item flow republishes the same item; if it sets a different field, the two publishers stop agreeing about what has been sent. One field, written by both. This is the kind of coupling that survives review because each function is individually correct.

Key the arrival publisher on membership, and remember that it also fires on departures. A count that goes 2 → 1 is still a change, which is why the branch re-checks count > 1 rather than trusting the emission. Keying on the count instead of the member list is deliberate: a member's buffering/connected flags churn constantly, and keying on the list republishes the whole session state on every one of them.

Do not fold the snapshot into the role flag's other consumers. The role transition usually drives several things at once — enabling publishing, disabling a conflicting feature, requesting a sync. Keeping the snapshot in its own collector is what lets it be re-entered from the arrival path too, and what keeps the other consumers from acquiring an ordering dependency on it.

Put the role in the key, not only in the body. The role publisher maps the whole state down to a single boolean before distinctUntilChanged, so it emits once per transition. Collect the state object instead and test the role inside the collector and it fires on every unrelated field — member flags, positions, buffering — republishing the entire session state each time. On a busy session that is a broadcast storm, and it looks like a network problem rather than a key that is too wide.

A snapshot with nothing in it is worse than no snapshot. Unlike the change publishers, this one fires on a transition of the role, which can easily land before anything is loaded — the user opens the session first and picks something afterwards. Return early on a null current item and on a blank identifier, in that order, or the group is handed an empty item and every follower dutifully loads nothing. The change publishers will cover it the moment something starts.

A follower does not publish, including when it takes over. The role flag gates the publishers, so a handover has to flip that flag before the snapshot runs, or the new source publishes nothing and the old one has already stopped. Verify the handover by watching the flag, not by watching the transport.

Verifying it

The property is "every publisher is edge-triggered except the ones that are deliberately not", so census them and look at what each is keyed on:

grep -rnE '(suspend )?fun publish[A-Za-z]*\(' --include='*.kt' . | grep -v '/build/'
grep -rlE '(suspend )?fun publish[A-Za-z]*\(' --include='*.kt' . | grep -v '/build/' | xargs -r grep -n -B10 'distinctUntilChanged()' | grep -E '\.map \{|distinctUntilChanged\(\)'

The first lists the publishers. Expect the edge-triggered set (item change, play/pause, seek, queue) plus two level-triggered entries — one keyed on the role, one on membership — plus the plain functions those delegate to, which is usually a snapshot builder and a queue sender. Around eight entries is normal. Only one of the two level-triggered ones is the common shipping state, and the missing one is a real defect with a distinct symptom: no role publisher means the session starts empty, no arrival publisher means late joiners see nothing while everyone already in it is fine.

The second prints each collector's key next to its distinctUntilChanged. Read the .map lines as a list: one should be the role flag, one the member count, and the rest should be state that genuinely changes when the source acts. The window is wide because a key can be a multi-line projection: a .map { with nothing after the brace proves such a key exists without showing you what is in it, so read that collector by hand — it is usually the most interesting one in the file — and a distinctUntilChanged() with no .map above it at all means the window is still too narrow for this tree rather than that the collector has no key. A key that is an object rather than the fields you care about is a different bug — see flatmaplatest-resubscribe-composite-key.

Then run the one scenario that only these publishers cover: start playing something, then open the session, and have a second client join without anybody touching the transport afterwards. The joiner must land on the right item, at roughly the right position, in the right play state. Touching the transport to "check it works" is what hides this — every other publisher fires the moment you do.