Multicasting shortcuts: publish() and variants
Because using multicast with a new Subject is such a common pattern, there is a shortcut in RxJS for this: the publish() operator. This lesson introduces publish() and its variants publishReplay(), publishBehavior(), publishLast(), share(), and shows how they simplify the creation of multicasted Observables.
[00:01] Using multicast with new subject plus a refCount is a very common pattern in RxJS to create shared executions. There's a shortcut for this. Instead of writing "Multicast new Subject," we can write .publish, and that does the same thing. Under the hood, if you check the source code for publish, it does multicast with new subject. It's just a shortcut, and it behaves in the same way as before.
[00:25] The way of reading publish refCount is if you have an observable like this that you want to have a shared execution, then you publish to broadcast it, or multicast it. We use refCount to automatically start the execution when the first subscriber arrives, and automatically stop when the last subscriber leaves.
[00:46] As a reminder, let's write here that publish is a multicast with a subject. There are different types of subjects, as we saw before. We also have, let's say, we could multicast with a new "replay Subject," with a buffer size of one. There's also a shortcut for this, and that would be "publish replay."
[01:14] You can give the arguments of the constructor of the replay subject here. For instance, we can put, let's say, 100 of buffer size.
[01:22] As a reminder here, "publish replay" is a Multicast with the replay subject. That's why the name is replay, because it reminds us that we're using this type of subject.
[01:35] As you can guess, we also have publish behavior. Here, it would take the default value, or the initial value. Because the behavior represents the values over time, it always has to have a value. This is the initial value. As a reminder, we can put here that publish behavior is a multicast with behavior subject.
[02:01] Finally, we also have a async subject. That's the other type of subject. That would not actually be async, but they decided to name it as "publish last." It doesn't take any argument. "Publish last" is a multicast with an async subject. They named it last, because async subject behaves very similar to the last operator.
[02:29] These variants of publish allow us to easily create a shared execution of the source observable, with just one word as the operator name. We can add a suffix like replay or behavior if we want to specify what to do for late subscribers, because the difference between subject replay, subject, and behavior subject is only noticed for late subscribers, subscribers that arrive late.
[02:54] We want to specify what to do for those late subscribers. Async subject is like a wild card here, because it behaves differently than those, but still it's rather rare to use it in async subject. The most common case will be a publish, so just a multicast and a subject.
[03:14] For that case, we have a shortcut which is called "share." Share does publish, and then it does refCount. Because publish and refCount is so common, they made an operator for that called Share. If you do it like this, "share," then what we're doing here is creating a multicasted observable, backed by a normal subject, and then it's already automatically starting and stopping with reference counting.
[03:42] If we run this, it's exactly the same execution that we had before. It's not a coincidence that I call this one "Shared," because this is a very common pattern. We have an observable that we want to have a shared execution we call .share, and it's going to be backed by a subject.
[03:59] Late subscribers are going to miss the events, but in that case, if you want to specify, you should do publish, replay, and then refCount.
[04:10] This conclusion is that if you're going to pass a newly created subject to the multicast, it's easier to use these shortcuts like publish and refCount, or even easier, .share.