Ending a connection

An agent connection can be disconnected on its own. After reading this page you will know where to do it, what stops immediately, what can still finish after you have done it, and why signing out of the app is not the same thing. Disconnecting one connection does not affect your Coffee Chats account, your ordinary sign-in, or any other connection.

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Where you disconnect an agent

There are two places, and both do exactly the same thing. Whichever one you use, Coffee Chats works out the account from the session you are already signed in with. You never name an account, and no agent can name one for you.

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What the list shows

Each entry shows the application that asked, the origin it was registered with, and the permissions it holds. The name is text the application supplied, so read the origin. For a web application the origin is a web address. For a command-line tool there is no web address, and the origin reads native://loopback. An entry that has been used shows the day it was last used, as a date rather than a time. Coffee Chats records that day at most once an hour, so the date tells you whether an agent is still working and not how many calls it made.

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Signing out of the app is not the same thing

Signing out of the Coffee Chats web or mobile app ends your own browser session and invalidates your own sign-in credential. It reads nothing about your agent connections and disconnects none of them.

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What a disconnect does

The moment a disconnect succeeds, Coffee Chats marks that connection disconnected. The agent’s current access credential stops working, and it cannot get a new one. The next call the agent makes on that connection is refused, and so is any attempt to renew the credential. The one exception is a change Coffee Chats had already cleared to run, described below. A disconnected connection cannot be resumed. Starting again means going through authorization and consent from the beginning.

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What can still finish

A disconnect also stops any change Coffee Chats has not already cleared to run. Clearance is bounded in three ways, and the bounds are the whole of what can still happen:

• A connection can hold at most four clearances at once.
• A clearance lasts thirty seconds, and that is a deadline for starting rather than a promise that the change has finished. A change that holds a clearance and does not start within it is refused, and nothing is written.
• A change that has already started is not stopped.

So a change that was already under way either landed or it did not. The connections list will not tell you which. Look at the thing that was being changed, such as your booking page or the setting itself, and see what it says now.

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The one change that leaves Coffee Chats

meeting_thank_you_send, mail.drafts.send, and mail.batch.enqueue are the three tools that send an email, so a disconnect can arrive too late to stop a message that is already queued. The clearance above is what bounds the thank-you. A stored-draft send and a table of drafts use the same delivery queue. The bounded window after revocation is one permit’s lifetime, which is at most thirty seconds. A revocation that lands before the permit is issued stops the send entirely; a revocation that lands after it cannot stop a dispatch that is already in flight, and that in-flight attempt is bounded by the permit’s thirty seconds. There is a cheaper stop than disconnecting: cancel the thank-you in the app. If you cancel before the message has been handed to the email provider, Coffee Chats takes the queued message back, returns the draft to you and the email is never sent. Once the sending has started there is nothing left to take back, so the app refuses the cancel and tells you the message is already on its way rather than pretending it was withdrawn. That attempt is bounded by the same thirty seconds as everything else above.

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Things that behave the way you might not expect

Disconnecting a connection twice is not an error. The second disconnect returns the connection exactly as it is and changes nothing. If somebody guesses a connection identifier, Coffee Chats answers the same way for an unknown identifier, a malformed identifier and somebody else’s identifier, so the answer does not reveal which identifiers are real.

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Deleting your account

Deleting your Coffee Chats account disconnects every live agent connection on it. Your record is scrubbed first, and every write an agent could still have in flight checks that record before it commits, so nothing an agent started can land afterwards.

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Next steps