Realtime

Important notes for users

Don't create more than one connection using the same state/device! This will lead you to unexpected behaviour when the previous connection from the same device is being dropped by instagram server. Instagram server doesn't tell the reason, it just drops the connection without explanations, so IGPAPI is not able to tell you what is going wrong. That's why you should pay close attention to this aspect while developing your systems. Moreover, IGPAPI have built-in auto-reconnect mechanism, so if you run 2 IGPAPI realtime connections simultaneously, you will end up in endless reconnection loop on both of these connections that will lead you to losing realtime events in reconnection gaps.

Advanced

This package contains the base client to handle realtime events on both web and Android. It appears both platforms talk to the same realtime interface/server (but with a different connect/auth process).

The IgpapiRealtime is the abstract class both implementations inherit from. It's main purpose is to handle and decode packets as well as manage the underlying mqtt client (e.g. reconnecting).

• It provides helper functions to simplify sending and receiving:

  • preparePayload Converts and encodes any data appropriately
  • encode- and decodeTopic map topic ids to their appropriate names
  • publishToMqtt, request and mqttSubscribe unify the publishing/subscribing

• It provides user facing methods/properties:

  • connect
  • irisSubscribe, graphQlSub, graphQlUnsub, skywalkerSub and skywalkerUnsub simplify the subscription to events
  • directCommands encodes direct messages

• It provides implementation specific abstract methods:

  • createMqttClient creates a transport/client for mqtt packets
  • connectToBroker connects the transport/client
  • postConnect is called after the connection succeeded in order to perform platform specific tasks

• It provides an interface for mixins.

Developing

In order to find events or validate existing logic, you have two options:

1. Test the client with debug logging enabled (highly recommended even if not testing). This can be done by simply interacting with the logged in account and logging messages.

2. Reverse engineer existing logic. This is platform specific. For more information, look in the android realtime and web realtime packages respectively. This a short summary:

   • Web: Use your browsers debugger feature. It's a big helper. You can break at any statement without needing to set up anything. Code related to mqtt can be found in /DirectMqtt.js/. The debugger probably has a button to pretty print the minified code. __d(function (...) {}) is just an export.
   • Android: For Android you may want to listen to the MQTT messages (guide is in android realtime). But you may also want to look through the code. You can use a decompiler for apks and search for important strings. This is the easiest method of finding the code responsible for a feature. Personally, I'd recommend GDA on Windows as it can search for Cross References (X), which is a huge timesaver.