Custom Events

You can use custom events to send data among the participants in the call. This is a realtime layer that you can use to broadcast your own events to.

Sending custom events

For example, if you are building a collaborative drawing app, you can send the coordinates to the other participants with the following code:

await call.sendCustomEvent({
  type: 'draw',
  x: 10,
  y: 30,
});

Please note that the total payload for these events is limited to 5KB in size.

Receiving custom events

Custom events are only delivered to clients that are watching the call.

To receive custom events, you need to subscribe to the custom event on the call instance:

const unsubscribe = call.on('custom', (event: CustomVideoEvent) => {
  const payload = event.custom;
  if (payload.type === 'draw') {
    console.log(`Received draw event: x=${payload.x}, y=${payload.y}`);
  }
});

// Unsubscribe when you no longer need to listen to custom events
unsubscribe();

For more information, check out our Events guide.