SailsSocket Keep Trying to Reconnect

After struggling with socket.io connection authentication (here and here) and thanks to @sgress454, I realized how to get this to work and I am sending the authentication/authorization token as part of the query in the connection (see below).

Upon authentication failure (invalid/expired token or in-active user), I return the callback with false parameter to indicate the connection is rejected.

On the client side though, I am not sure how I should handled it and it seems the socket is trying to reconnect even after explicitly disconnecting - I keep seeing that it is trying to reconnect.

The client code is something like this:

var _onConnectError = function(err) {
    if (err.description == 400) {
        console.log("Connection rejected");
        _disconnectAndCleanupSocket();
    } else {
        console.log("##SOCKET - connect_error", err.description, err);
    }
}

var _disconnectAndCleanupSocket = function() {
    if (io.socket) {
        if (io.socket.isConnected()) {
            io.socket.disconnect();
        }

        io.socket.removeAllListeners();
        delete io.socket;
    }
};

io.socket = io.sails.connect({ query: "token=" + token});
io.socket.on('connect', _onConnect);
io.socket.on('connect_error', _onConnectError);
io.socket.on('reconnect_error', _onConnectError);

On the server (config/sockets.js) I have:

beforeConnect: function(handshake, cb) {
    var token = handshake._query ? handshake._query.token : null;

    CipherService.verifyToken(token, function verifyTokenResults(err, decoded, info) {
        if (err || !decoded) {
            if (err.name === "TokenExpiredError") {
                // token expired - user can't connect...
                return cb(null, false);
            } else {
                // some other error...
                return cb(err, false);
            }
        }

        AuthUser.findOne(decoded.user.id).exec(function(err, user) {
            if (err || !user || !user.is_active) {
                return cb(null, false);
            }

            return cb(null, true);
        });
    });
    // (`false` would reject the connection)
},

I have tried to find documentation and explored the response object (in developer tools) but the only thing I saw there was thedescription field which return 400 on rejection and 0 in case there is no response (e.g. server is down).

Is there some example/documentation for this? Overall, I didn't find detailed description of using the SailsSocket in non-standard cases (other then use io.sails.connect()).

What is the proper way to handle such rejection (and shouldn't it handle it as part of the sails socket.io client?)

As an aside, I cannot instantiate SailsSocket myself and only do this with the 'io.sails.connect()' function. Is that on purpose? Is there no option to "miss" an event when I create the socket with the connect method and only then assign event handlers?

The short answer to your question is that you can set the reconnection flag to turn automatic reconnection on or off:

// Disable auto-reconnect for all new socket connections
io.sails.reconnection = false;

// Disable auto-reconnect for a single new socket connection
var mySocket = io.sails.connect({reconnection: false});

As far as SailsSocket creation, you are correct in that io.sails.connect() is the only way to create a SailsSocket. Since the connection is asynchronous, any event handlers you bind immediately after calling connect will be added before the actual connection takes place, so you won't miss any notifications.