Acknowlegement vs Emit in Socket IO

Question

When should I use acknowledgment over emit in socket.io? Should it be used for data transport as a request/response.

Let's say I have an app with an endpoint that asks for a list of conversations, the server will contain a listener called my-conversations. To send data back to the caller, should I use acknowledgment callback or should I emit it?

Answer 1

Imho, "emit" was created to send datas, but "acknowledgment" exists to tell you that some datas were correctly received by your pair.

This is especially usefull when you're checking data integrity with calculation or cryptography.

It is mostly used to avoid repetitive pieces of code, and saves the pain of having classical paired call/response events...

So, Question 1 : use it when you want to confirm that datas were correctly received.
Question 2 : you can use it automatically as a data-transport checking "personnal protocol".
Question 3 : in that specific case, prefer "emit" to send datas, but the caller can send an acknowledgment to the emitter after receiving datas (or not, depending of datas integrity).

More informations :
Acknowledgement_(data_networks)