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project-robius / robrix

A Matrix chat client written in pure Rust using the Makepad UI toolkit and the Robius app dev framework
MIT License
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Merge the Avatar MediaCache into the user profile cache, and then use the user profile cache everywhere #96

Closed kevinaboos closed 3 weeks ago

kevinaboos commented 1 month ago

This includes not only the user profile logic, but also the timeline logic where user's displayable names and avatars are shown.

The reason for this is that when the server is slow, a request to fetch a profile takes a very long time, e.g., even in excess of 30 seconds per request (yikes). That means that it is likely for a user profile pane to be hidden long before the fetched profile response becomes available, meaning that the cache itself will never get updated.

In addition, the user profile sliding pane may have different (more recently updated) info than what is being shown in the timeline, causing a confusing mismatch until the timeline also gets updated. We should only have one source of this info, hence the need to merge the two caches.

This cache should also be used when fetching and drawing user displayable names and avatars, as a sort of "backup" option when the timeline itself doesn't have full info on all members of the room (which can happen in larger rooms where a fetch_members() command takes a very long time).

This means we also need to move the logic for applying updates to the cache to a place that gets called more frequently, e.g., the timeline event handler.

Also, for added clarity, we should rename AvatarInfo to something like UserProfileAndRoomId to be more clear, since that info does not strictly pertain to avatars.

Unknown: i'm not sure how to listen for timeline-driven updates to user profiles such that we can update our own cache, which exists separately from the matrix_sdk::Client's internal cache or the matrix_sdk_ui-driven internal cache.

kevinaboos commented 1 month ago

~~for the Unknown above, we could potentially subscribe to all room updates in order to watch for events that result in an update to a user profile/avatar. But that'd be like drinking from the firehose. We could reduce that a bit by subscribing to updates from just select rooms.~~

EDIT: never mind, those functions subscribe to streams of room join/invite/leave events, which doesn't include updates to user profile info.

kevinaboos commented 1 month ago

There's apparently no means to receive update streams for user profiles, even when specifically calling fetch_members() on a room. So we have no choice but to merge the caches and then always query the SDK-internal cache first, and only use our external merged user profile cache as a backup query.

kevinaboos commented 3 weeks ago

Marking this closed by #106, however I decided to not merge the two caches, but rather to keep them separate.

The real key design difference was using the user profile cache as a backup when querying for user profiles for the sender of each timeline event.