[RxJS] RefCount: automatically starting and stopping an execution

With the connect() method on a ConnectableObservable, the programmer is responsible for avoiding leaked executions of shared RxJS Observables. This lesson will teach you about refCount(), a handy operator that creates an automatically connected Observable, to avoid manually using connect().

After multicast(new Rx.Subject()), we call refCount(), so it will help us to manage the connections, so we don‘t need to worry about the memory leak.

var shared = Rx.Observable.interval(1000)
  .do(x => console.log(‘source ‘ + x))
  .multicast(new Rx.Subject())
  .refCount();

var observerA = {
  next: function (x) { console.log(‘A next ‘ + x); },
  error: function (err) { console.log(‘A error ‘ + err); },
  complete: function () { console.log(‘A done‘); },
};

var subA = shared.subscribe(observerA); // start

var observerB = {
  next: function (x) { console.log(‘B next ‘ + x); },
  error: function (err) { console.log(‘B error ‘ + err); },
  complete: function () { console.log(‘B done‘); },
};

var subB;
setTimeout(function () {
  subB = shared.subscribe(observerB); // 1 => 2
}, 2000);

setTimeout(function () {
  subA.unsubscribe(); // 2 => 1
  console.log(‘unsubscribed A‘);
}, 5000);

setTimeout(function () {
  subB.unsubscribe(); // 1 => 0 (stop)
  console.log(‘unsubscribed B‘);
}, 7000);

/*
"source 0"
"A next 0"
"source 1"
"A next 1"
"source 2"
"A next 2"
"B next 2"
"source 3"
"A next 3"
"B next 3"
"source 4"
"A next 4"
"B next 4"
"unsubscribed A"
"source 5"
"B next 5"
"source 6"
"B next 6"
"unsubscribed B"
*/