An API to change firebase reference?

[Blakeinstein]

I want to provide multi file support. Instantiating multiple monaco editors can affect performance. I think we can use monaco's ITextModel api, to be able to track multiple files.

[0xTheProDev]

@Blakeinstein Can you provide some code example to explain your use-case?

[Blakeinstein]

I am planning to add collab on multiple file documents, that I plan to write to a file on a remote machine. Now Currently I get around this by,

1. Instantiating a single monaco editor.
2. Creating a firebase reference.
3. Implement a file tree, and on item select, I dispose off any existing firepad instance, then create a new firepad instance with a child ref corresponding to that particular file.

This works overall, but I also need to list active users, and every file contains a separate user list. Which is useful to say which people are on the current file, but I then dont have a way to easily list all users.

I was interested in more of a native way of achieving this.

[0xTheProDev]

@Blakeinstein That's actually the right way to switch Firebase reference. We have some number of side effects associated with Firebase ref on creation of Firepad. These need to be handled well, and hence calling dispose() is crucial. One suggestion I can provide, is to have another layer of abstraction between Firepad and you app, with a map between Monaco Model URI and their Firepad reference. You can make this map into a probabilistic data structure (a LRU perhaps), and have good first connection with limited memory footprint.

[Blakeinstein]

That sounds great and I have been doing just that. Thanks!

Was interested in a more native way of doing this. where i dont have to maintain multiple users list.

[0xTheProDev]

@Blakeinstein Let me think it through if we can expose some APIs with User presence data.