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Overview

A Channel is an asynchronous delivery mechanism used to transport content into and out of a Workspace. To use the email analogy again, a Channel would be the SMTP/IMAP/POP server used to deliver messages to/from email addresses. However, as Coucal does not have senders or recipients of content, a Channel is responsible for publishing and consuming (or subscribing to) content.

A Channel SHOULD support the following features:

  • Ability to publish content, along with the context in which it exists. For example, the context would include the Repository collection.
  • Deliver content to subscribers asynchronously, or continue to attempt delivery according to configured parameters.
  • Support different subscription types to allow delivery based on explicit content subscription and contextual (i.e. collection) subscriptions.
  • Ability to consume content published via external sources, such that it may be delivered to appropriate Repository collections based on contextual information.

Egress

An Egress Channel supports delivery of content updates to Subscribers. A Channel may be configured to deliver content from multiple Repositories.

Ingress

An Ingress Channel supports consuming content updates from external sources.