Add timeout support when connecting user

[nuno-vieira]

🔗 Issue Links

https://stream-io.atlassian.net/browse/PBE-4780

🎯 Goal

Add support for timing out reconnection.

📝 Summary

SDK:

• Add an option to configure reconnection timeout
• Fix Channel List not hiding error view when data is available
• Fix not trying to connect if the network is not available (This can cause edge cases, according to Apple)
• Ignore network status since it is not reliable, even on the device sometimes network status is not returned correctly
• Fix invalid token errors considered as possible to reconnect

DemoApp:

• Fix the demo app not showing the connection bar
• Fixes fake token failures in the demo app not working
• Fix Demo App channel list error view animation

🛠 Implementation

An alternative approach to #3302 uses a separate entity to control the timeout, independent of the exponential backoff mechanism.

It uses a separate timeout handler to timeout the reconnection logic instead of using a number of retries of the existing backoff retry mechanism. The 2 main reasons for using a separate timeout handler are the following:

• It is clearer for the customer to expose a maximum timeout time than a maximum number of retries.
• It has less impact in the implementation of RetryStrategy, which at the moment has some flaws, described in this document: https://www.notion.so/stream-wiki/Reconnection-Problems-63eeaaab19d94d50b9922b76ebb414ab

🧪 Manual Testing Notes

With timeout

1. Go To Demo App Configuration Screen
2. Set reconnection timeout, ex: 15s
3. Disable Network on your device
4. Login
5. Should show "Connecting..." banner
6. After 15s
7. Should show "Disconnect" banner
8. Enable Network on your device
9. Should show "Connecting.." and then "Connected" and then disappear
10. Tap on Error View to reload the channel list
11. Should load channel list

Without timeout

1. Go To Demo App Configuration Screen
2. Disable timeout (By default)
3. Disable Network on your device
4. Login
5. Should show "Connecting..." banner
6. Wait 60s
7. Should still show "Connecting..." banner
8. Enable Network on your device
9. Should show "Connected" and then disappear
10. Tap on Error View to reload the channel list
11. Should load channel list

Retest token refresh:

1. Open Demo App Configuration
2. Edit tokenRefreshDetails
3. Add a fake App Secret
4. Set the duration, ex: 10
5. Set the number of refreshes, ex: 3
6. Login
7. Should see "Demo App Token Refreshing: Token refresh failed." 3x in Xcode Console
8. Should see "Disconnected"
9. Logout
10. Put a valid App Secret from Stream's Dashboard
11. Should see "Demo App Token Refreshing: Token refresh failed." 3x in Xcode Console
12. Then you should see "Connected"
13. For each 10 seconds, the banner should show "Connecting" -> "Connected"

☑️ Contributor Checklist

• I have signed the Stream CLA (required)
• This change should be manually QAed
• Changelog is updated with client-facing changes
• Changelog is updated with new localization keys
• New code is covered by unit tests
• Comparison screenshots added for visual changes
• Affected documentation updated (docusaurus, tutorial, CMS)

[Stream-SDK-Bot]

StreamChat XCMetrics

target	metric	benchmark	branch	performance	status
MessageList	Hitches total duration	10 ms	1.67 ms	83.3% 🔼	🟢
	Duration	2.6 s	2.55 s	1.92% 🔼	🟢
	Hitch time ratio	4 ms per s	0.65 ms per s	83.75% 🔼	🟢
	Frame rate	75 fps	78.53 fps	4.71% 🔼	🟢
	Number of hitches	1	0.2	80.0% 🔼	🟢
ChannelList	Hitches total duration	12.5 ms	5.84 ms	53.28% 🔼	🟢
	Duration	2.6 s	2.55 s	1.92% 🔼	🟢
	Hitch time ratio	5 ms per s	2.3 ms per s	54.0% 🔼	🟢
	Frame rate	72 fps	74.81 fps	3.9% 🔼	🟢
	Number of hitches	1.2	0.4	66.67% 🔼	🟢

[martinmitrevski]

Looks good, just added few questions. In any case, @testableapple can start testing.

[martinmitrevski]

Some risky changes here and there. Can't we limit this PR to the timeout support only? This whole reconnection thing was very fragile already, not sure if we should do all these changes.

[nuno-vieira]

Some risky changes here and there. Can't we limit this PR to the timeout support only? This whole reconnection thing was very fragile already, not sure if we should do all these changes.

@martinmitrevski All changes are required to pass all QA Scenarios. I tried to make the changes as minimal as possible, but even with a simple change, there was always something conflicting. As you said, this part is very fragile. This PR is already a step in making it less fragile, because it makes things simpler and more obvious.

[martinmitrevski]

Let's merge it then. Please check the failing e2e tests first - something around the offline mode, not sure if it's connected to your changes.
Afterwards, @testableapple should do a thorough QA around reconnection and token expiry.

[testableapple]

LGTM ✅
Just one tiny issue, discussed in slack.

[sonarcloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
141 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
84.1% Coverage on New Code
0.1% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarCloud

[masarusanjp]

@nuno-vieira @martinmitrevski Hello, I found that this code is causing an issue, so I'm leaving a comment.

connectGuestUser calls logOut first. As a result, ConnectionRecoveryHandler.stop is invoked, causing the monitoring of appDidBecomeActive and appDidEnterBackground to stop. This leads to the issue where "the WebSocket does not reconnect when the app resumes from the background."

[masarusanjp]

I posted issue #3338

[nuno-vieira]

Hi @masarusanjp, thanks for spotting this issue!

The actual issue is that when reconnecting, logOut should not be happening, so the logic should be changed here. Stopping the recovery handler on logout is something that we want, but it caused this unwanted side effect due to the fact that logOutFirst in guest users is not properly implemented, it seems.