Proposal for ConnectableObservable#connectOnSubscribe

ConnectableObservable currently supports two standard ways to manage subscriptions to the source:

1. connect which immediately subscribes to the source and never unsubscribes (unless the source completes)
2. refCount which subscribes when the number of subscriptions goes up from 0, and unsubscribes the source when the number of subscriptions hits 0 again.

Something I ran into a couple times now is a mixture of the two: subscribe to the source on the first subscription, but then stay connected even if all subscriptions go away. Perhaps I’m also just missing something and this can be trivially done already in a natural way (?), but if not, I’d love to see it. 😃

[cartant]

Yep, but the idea expressed in the comment’s snippet is useful. I used it to create an operator that waits a specified amount of time before unsubscribing: https://github.com/cartant/rxjs-etc/blob/master/source/let/refCountAuditTime.ts

You could also look at the implementation of shareReplay - in this repo - as it does what you seem to want: it never unsubscribes. Some parts of that implementation can be removed, too. See this thread: https://github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/issues/3127

[cartant]

You might find this comment of Paul Taylor’s interesting. In fact, that entire thread is interesting.