PUBLISH_DONE

A publisher sends a PUBLISH_DONE message as the final message before closing the subscription's bidi stream to indicate it is done publishing Objects for that subscription. The Status Code indicates why the subscription ended, and whether it was an error. Because PUBLISH_DONE is sent on a request stream, it is likely to arrive at the receiver before late-arriving objects, and often even late-opening streams. However, the receiver uses it as an indication that it should receive any late-opening streams in a relatively short time.

Note that some objects in the subscribed track might never be delivered, because a stream was reset, or never opened in the first place, due to the delivery timeouts (see Section 5.2).

A sender MUST NOT send PUBLISH_DONE until it has closed all streams it will ever open, and has no further datagrams to send, for a subscription. After sending PUBLISH_DONE, the sender can immediately destroy subscription state, although stream state can persist until delivery completes. The sender might persist subscription state to enforce the subgroup delivery timeout.

A sender MUST NOT destroy subscription state until it sends PUBLISH_DONE, though it can choose to stop sending objects (and thus send PUBLISH_DONE) for any reason.

A subscriber that receives PUBLISH_DONE SHOULD set a timer of at least the larger of SUBGROUP_DELIVERY_TIMEOUT or OBJECT_DELIVERY_TIMEOUT in case some objects are still inbound due to prioritization or packet loss. The subscriber MAY dispense with a timer if it unsubscribed or is otherwise no longer interested in objects from the track. Once the timer has expired, the receiver destroys subscription state once all open streams for the subscription have closed. A subscriber MAY discard subscription state earlier, at the cost of potentially not delivering some late objects to the application. The subscriber SHOULD send STOP_SENDING on all streams related to the subscription when it deletes subscription state.

The format of PUBLISH_DONE is as follows:

PUBLISH_DONE Message {
  Type (vi64) = 0xB,
  Length (16),
  Status Code (vi64),
  Stream Count (vi64),
  Error Reason (Reason Phrase)
}

• Status Code: An integer status code indicating why the subscription ended.

• Stream Count: An integer indicating the number of data streams the publisher opened for this subscription, including streams that contained no Objects (e.g., an empty Subgroup) and including any fill fetch streams (see Section 3.4). This helps the subscriber know if it has received all of the data published in this subscription by comparing the number of streams received. The subscriber can immediately remove all subscription state once the same number of streams have been processed. If the publisher did not open any streams for this subscription, the publisher MUST set Stream Count to 0. If the publisher is unable to set Stream Count to the exact number of streams opened for the subscription, it MUST set Stream Count to 2^64 - 1. Subscribers SHOULD use a timeout or other mechanism to remove subscription state in case the publisher set an incorrect value, reset a stream before the SUBGROUP_HEADER, or set the maximum value. If a subscriber receives more streams for a subscription than specified in Stream Count, it MAY close the session with a PROTOCOL_VIOLATION.

• Error Reason: Provides the reason for subscription error. See Section 8.5.

The status codes used in PUBLISH_DONE are defined in Section 12.4.