Uncaught Error: data must be a buffer, was: {}

[austinfrey]

I am using muxrpc to communicate over a websocket from the browser to a local node process. (I am using browserify) When using the client in the browser, I am seeing this error when trying to call an rpc method: Uncaught Error: data must be a buffer, was: {}.

It looks like pull-reader throws this error here when checking if the response data is a buffer. In the browser, these responses are coming back as Blob objects, not buffers (not sure why though). The code below works fine when used serverside, so my hunch is the browser is doing some type of coercion on the data to convert it to a Blob. I ran a quick test to see if converting the blob to a buffer works and it seems too. Could a check be added to test if if (data instanceof Blob) convertBlobToBuf(data)?

We could do it in this module on this line: https://github.com/pull-stream/pull-ws/blob/master/source.js#L31

Or is there a better way to handle this. I can handle a PR but not sure which module a check like this should go, and also, maybe I'm just doing something wrong since I haven't seen any other GH issues reference this problem. @arj03 You are doing quite a bit on the browserside, have you ever seen this error?

Reproduce with this code.
client.js (browserify client.js -o bundle.js)

const {pull} = require('pull-stream')
const connect = require('pull-ws/client')
const MRPC = require('muxrpc')

const manifest = {
  hello: 'async'
}

connect('ws://localhost:3333', function (err, stream) {
  const mrpc = MRPC(manifest, null) ()
  if(err) console.log(err) //handle err
  pull(
    stream, 
    mrpc.createStream(), 
    stream
  )
  
  mrpc.hello('armor', function (err, outArgs) {
    if (err) {
      return console.error(err)
    }
    console.log(outArgs)
  })
})

server.js

const {pull} = require('pull-stream')
const createServer = require('pull-ws/server')
const MRPC = require('muxrpc')


const manifest = {
  hello: 'async'
}

const api = {
  hello: (name, cb) => cb(null, 'Hello ' + name)
}

createServer(function (stream) {
  const mrpc = MRPC(null, manifest) (api)

  pull(
    stream,
    mrpc.createStream(),
    stream
  )
}).listen(3333)

[arj03]

Hey Austin

I havn't run into this problem, not sure but maybe its because I havn't run async functions over muxrpc, only streams.

[austinfrey]

thanks @arj03, i did run into the same problem with stream so 🤷‍♂️ i submitted a PR but not sure I solved this the correct way.

I did see this comment at the top of source.js that made me think perhaps someone else has had a similar issue.