Understanding channel namespaces

Channel namespaces (or just namespaces for short) define the channels that are available on your Event API, and the capabilities and behaviors of these channels. Channel namespaces provide a scalable approach to managing large numbers of channels. Instead of configuring each channel individually, developers can apply settings across an entire namespace.

Each namespace has a name. This name represents the starting segment (the prefix) of a channel path. Any channel where the first segment in the path matches the name of a namespace, belongs to that namespace. For example, any channel with a first segment of default, such as /default/messages, /default/greetings, and /default/inbox/user belongs to the namespace named default. A channel namespace is made up of a maximum of five segments.

In a sports-related Event API example, you could have namespaces such as basketball, soccer, and baseball, with channels within each namespace such as basketball/games/1, soccer/scores, and baseball/players.

You can only publish and subscribe to channels that belong to a defined namespace. However, a channel is ephemeral and is created on-demand when a client needs to publish or subscribe to it.