Implementing Live Data Subscriptions

Welcome to the final lesson on tRPC real-time! We've learned about WebSockets, now let's build live data features.

Subscriptions in tRPC allow your server to push real-time updates to connected clients. Unlike queries (which pull data) or mutations (which modify data), subscriptions are push-based.

• Queries: Client asks, server responds once.
• Mutations: Client sends data, server performs action, responds once.
• Subscriptions: Client asks once, server sends updates over time.

To create a subscription on your tRPC server, you use the createSubscription helper, similar to createQuery or createMutation.

A key difference is that a subscription procedure returns an observable. An observable is a stream of data that can emit multiple values over time.

Let's look at the basic structure.