How to stop a goroutine that is listening for Reth

Question

I am trying to figure out how to use RethinkDB changefeeds with golang. My specific question is how to stop a goroutine that listens for changes to the database. See, for example, the function getData() below. I run this from a handler function by calling go getData(c). Whenever the database updates, the record is passed to the channel c, which is then passed to the handler function and sent to the client using SSE technology. My question is: when the client disconnects, I know how to stop and exit the handler function; however the goroutine that is running the getData() function, keeps running. What can I do to close it? One solution I can think of based on other answers on stackoverflow is to send a signal to close the goroutine on another channel and use a select statement to handle this signal. For example, I can replace

    for cur.Next(&rec) {
        c <- rec
    }

in the function definition below with:

    for cur.Next(&rec) {
        select {
         case <- closesignal:
            return
         default:
            c <- rec
        }
    }

where, closesignal is another channel that is given as a third argument to getData() and a message is sent on this channel by the handler when the client disconnects.

The problem with this approach is: what if the result of the specific rethinkdb query never updates. In that case, the for cur.Next(&rec) loop will not be entered and the closesignal will not be used. Would this goroutine then keep running? If so, how do I stop this goroutine?

The getData() function

func getData(session *r.Session, c chan interface{}) {
    var rec interface{}

    changesOpts := r.ChangesOpts{
        IncludeInitial: true,
    }

    cur, err := r.DB(DBNAME).Table("test").Changes(changesOpts).Run(session)
    if err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        return
    }
    defer cur.Close()

    defer func() {
        fmt.Println("exiting getData goroutine()...")
    }()


    for cur.Next(&rec) {
        c <- rec
    }

}

Answer 1

You should stop the changefeed via context. You can pass your context to the RunOpts. This will close your changefeed immediately.

Answer 2

You can stop a goroutine that is listening to a changefeed by closing the cursor. For example this code will listen to a changefeed for 10 seconds before closing:

go func() {
    time.Sleep(10 * time.Second)
    cur.Close()
}()

for cur.Next(&rec) {
    c <- rec
}

// Loop exits as the cursor has been closed