Main article: Data Channels

Exchanging Messages and Data

Rainway provides Peers with the ability to create Data Channels, over which they can exchange arbitrary application-level binary data.

Sending messages over this channel is permitted any time two peers are connected end-to-end, whether they're streaming or not.

Initialization

The peer that requested the peer-to-peer connection is responsible for creating Data Channels.

peer.createDataChannel({ id: "Messages", mode: RainwayChannelMode.Reliable });

The peer that accepted the connection request then gets a DataChannel event for each created channel.

peer.addEventListener("datachannel", (ev) => {
  const dc = ev.data; // I am the created data channel
});

Sending and receiving messages

To send a message, use send on the DataChannel.

dc.send("hello world");

Messages from the remote Peer are received by the OnPeerMessage handler:

dc.addEventListener("message", (ev) => {
  // Uint8Array data, composing the message
  const data = ev.data;
  
  // same data, interpreted as a utf-8 string
  const str = ev.asString;
});