Change Role

Role is a powerful concept that takes a lot of complexity away in handling permissions and supporting features like breakout rooms. Learn more about roles here.

Each HMSPeer instance has a role property which returns an HMSRole instance. You can use this property to do following:

1. Check what this role is allowed to publish. i.e can it send video (and at what resolution)? can it send audio? can it share screen? Who can this role subscribe to? (eg: student can only see the teacher's video) This is can be discovered by checking publishSettings and subscribeSettings properties.
2. Check what actions this role can perform. i.e can it change someone else's current role, end meeting, remove someone from the room. This is can be discovered by checking the permissions property.

In certain scenarios you may want to change someone's role. Imagine an audio room with 2 roles "speaker" and "listener". Only someone with a "speaker" role can publish audio to the room while "listener" can only subscribe. Now at some point "speaker" may decide to nominate some "listener" to become a "speaker". This is where the changeRole API comes in.

To invoke the api you will need 3 things.

• remotePeer: An instance of HMSPeer of the peer who's role you want to change.
• toRole: The HMSRole instance for the target role.
• force: Whether you want to change their role without asking them or give them a chance to accept/reject.

All the peers that are in the current room are accessible via getPeers method of HMSSDK instance after a successful room join.

A list of all available roles in the current room can be accessed via the getRoles method of HMSSDK.

Once you have all you can invoke:

 
fun changeRole(remotePeer : HMSPeer, toRole: HMSRole, force: Boolean) {
    hmsSDK.changeRole(remotePeer, toRole, force)
}

If the change role succeeds you will get an update in the HMSUpdateListener:

 
fun onPeerUpdate(type: HMSPeerUpdate, peer: HMSPeer)

with the the same peer you passed as targetPeer and a ROLE_CHANGED update type.

The force parameter in changeRole, when false, is basically a polite request: "Would you like to change you role from listener to speaker?" which can be ignored by the other party. The way it works is the other party will first receive a

 
fun onRoleChangeRequest(request: HMSRoleChangeRequest)

callback in HMSUpdateListener. At which point the app can choose to show a prompt to the user asking for permission. If the user accepts, app should call

 
hmsSDK.acceptChangeRole(hmsRoleChangeRequest)

with the same request which it received in onRoleChangeRequest which completes the changeRole loop. Both parties will receive a roleUpdated callback so that they both can do necessary UI updates. Now the user actually becomes a speaker and the audio publishing will start automatically.

Now lets imagine the newly nominated speaker is not behaving nicely and we want to move him back to listener without a prompt. This is where the force parameter comes in. When it is set to true the other party will not receive a confirmation roleChangeRequest but instead will straight away receive a new set of updated permissions and stop publishing. roleUpdated callback will still be fired so that the app can update the user's UI state.