RxJS Subscriber unsubscribe vs. complete

Question

I was reading through the RxJS docs and want to make sure I'm understanding the difference between Subscriber.unsubscribe() and Subscriber.complete().

Let's say I have an observable with two subscribers, subscriber1 and subscriber2. If subscriber1 calls unsubscribe on their subscription, it will no longer receive notifications from the observable but subscriber2 will continue to receive them.

The docs for .complete():

The Observer callback to receive a valueless notification of type complete from the Observable. Notifies the Observer that the Observable has finished sending push-based notifications.

Does this mean that in the same scenario above, subscriber1 could call complete and it would end the observable and stop the stream for both subscriber1 and subscriber2?

Answer 1

Subscribers don't call complete(). You can call complete() on a Subject or more typically it's called for you "indirectly" using operators such as take(), takeWhile(), ...

For example:

const s = new Subject();
const subscriber1 = s.subscribe(...);
const subscriber2 = s.subscribe(...);
s.complete(); // both subscribers will receive the complete notification

// or with `take(1)` operator it'll call `complete()` for you
const subscriber1 = s.take(1).subscribe(...);
const subscriber2 = s.take(1).subscribe(...);
s.next(42); // both subscribers will receive the complete notification

Note that calling complete() on a Subject changes its inner state and there's no way to make it non-complete again while just unsubscribing a subscriber has no effect on the Subject.

A little similar question: Observable Finally on Subscribe