Streaming Responses

For a large response, waiting until every record is ready can delay useful work. If a partner requests thousands of catalog records and the API builds the entire response before sending it, the partner waits for the last record before seeing the first. Streaming lets the partner begin consuming results while the server continues producing them.

That benefit changes the failure contract. Once part of the response has arrived, the API cannot take it back or replace the original status code.

This chapter explains record framing, incremental parsing, completion, partial failures, backpressure, and cancellation using a finite bookstore catalog stream over HTTPS.