Best Practices

This page collects practical recommendations for using PubSub MFE safely and efficiently in production.

Topic Naming

• Use domain-oriented names: domain.entity.action (e.g., cart.item.add).
• Avoid deeply nested topics unless necessary.
• Reserve a small set of global topics (e.g., #) for cross-cutting concerns like telemetry.

Subscription Management

• Use AbortSignal for lifecycle-managed subscriptions in UI frameworks.
• Prefer single wildcard subscriptions (cart.#) instead of many specific subscriptions.
• Provide context when subscribing to ease debugging.

Payload Design

• Keep payloads small — send IDs and small deltas instead of large objects.
• Use stable schemas and include schemaVersion in the message envelope.
• Consider storing large blobs in IndexedDB and passing references in messages.

Adapter & Transport Use

• Let adapters handle cross-tab/iframe transport specifics — don't reimplement transport logic in application code.
• Use Auto transports for broad browser compatibility.
• Configure batching and deduplication on adapters for high-throughput scenarios.

Error Handling

• Wrap handler logic with try/catch and report errors to a centralized error collector.
• Avoid mutating incoming message objects — treat them as immutable snapshots.

Security

• Validate messages at boundaries using JSON Schema or runtime checks.
• Do not trust meta.source in untrusted environments—combine with origin checks.
• Limit the use of # (global subscriptions) in public-facing bundles.

Testing & Observability

• Add an integration test that simulates multiple tabs using the cross-tab adapter.
• Use a lightweight telemetry listener during development to measure throughput and handler latencies.
• Expose adapter statistics (where available) to monitor transport health.

See also: Performance Benchmarks and Transports.