Support for Invoking Edge Functions Returning a server-sent events in client library.

[david-fischer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Yes. Currently, there seems to be no possibility to invoke an Edge Function that returns a server-sent events using the client library.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to see the implementation of an additional function, which could return a Stream of server-sent events instead of standard promise.

Describe alternatives you've considered
One alternative I considered was to simply await the full result. However, this would leave the user waiting for a long period, which is not an ideal user experience.

Additional context
The motivation is a project, where we are looking to implement a ChatGPT interface within our Flutter application, and we need to stream the response of the API call to OpenAI to the user in real-time.

Implementing this functionality on the backend as an Edge Function was straightforward enough - I followed the tutorial on Streaming Data in Edge Functions by Supabase (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N66JBRLNYU).

[dshukertjr]

@david-fischer
We actually will not support this on our client library, but there are third party packages such as flutter_client_sse that you can use to get data as stream.

Here is an javascript implementation sample that might help!
https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/13124#discussioncomment-5596708

[david-fischer]

Hello @dshukertjr,
thanks for the quick reply and the guidance regarding the implementation!

Definetly, implementing calling the edge-function and get the data as stream would be another possibility, that I did not explicitly state in my issue. Generally, this is something I would be very happy to avoid, as I basically have to duplicate logic from the SupabaseClient, introducing a further coupling to specifics in the API, authentication, etc... into our codebase.

Is there any place, where Supabase users can upvote feature-requests to maybe influence your roadmap? I feel like specifically with chatGPT, this seems like a very common use-case that greatly improves the end-user experience!

Thanks and kind regards,
David

[dshukertjr]

@david-fischer We don't really have a single source of truth for the community to upvote on feature requests, but I can pass the feedback to the functions team internally.

[dshukertjr]

Let me transfer this issue to js repo so that more people can see this and comment on it.

[soulofmischief]

I made a PR for this months ago here, it's two lines and enables SSE in the library: #74

@dshukertjr why wouldn't functions-js support this? Please consider reviewing and merging my PR, all it does is directly return the response on detecting a response type of text/event-stream. It's worked just fine for me.

[dshukertjr]

@laktek Would you be able to take a look at this issue and this PR?
#74

[soulofmischief]

Thanks so much!

@david-fischer in the meantime you should be able to get the same result outside of the client with minimal coupling by using the following pattern:

const response = await fetch( FUNCTION_ENDPOINT, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'Authorization': supabase.auth.headers.Authorization
    },
    body: JSON.stringify(body)
  })