matrix-spec/proposals/2946-spaces-summary.md

MSC2946: Spaces Summary

This MSC depends on MSC1772, which describes why a Space is useful:

Collecting rooms together into groups is useful for a number of purposes. Examples include:

• Allowing users to discover different rooms related to a particular topic: for example "official matrix.org rooms".
• Allowing administrators to manage permissions across a number of rooms: for example "a new employee has joined my company and needs access to all of our rooms".
• Letting users classify their rooms: for example, separating "work" from "personal" rooms.

We refer to such collections of rooms as "spaces".

This MSC attempts to solve how a member of a space discovers rooms in that space. This is useful for quickly exposing a user to many aspects of an entire community, using the examples above, joining the "official matrix.org rooms" space might suggest joining a few rooms:

• A room to discuss development of the Matrix Spec.
• An announcements room for news related to matrix.org.
• An off-topic room for members of the space.

Proposal

A new client-server API (and corresponding server-server API) is added which allows for querying for the rooms and spaces contained within a space. This allows a client to efficiently display a hierarchy of rooms to a user (i.e. without having to walk the full state of each room).

Client-server API

An endpoint is provided to walk the space tree, starting at the provided room ID ("the root room"), and visiting other rooms/spaces found via m.space.child events. It recurses into the children and into their children, etc.

Any child room that the user is joined or is potentially joinable (per MSC3173) is included in the response. When a room with a type of m.space is found, it is searched for valid m.space.child events to recurse into.

In order to provide a consistent experience, the space tree should be walked in a depth-first manner, e.g. whenever a space is found it should be recursed into by sorting the children rooms and iterating through them.

There could be loops in the returned child events; clients and servers should handle this gracefully. Similarly, note that a child room might appear multiple times (e.g. also be a grandchild). Clients and servers should handle this appropriately.

This endpoint requires authentication and is subject to rate-limiting.

Request format

GET /_matrix/client/v1/rooms/{roomID}/hierarchy

Query Parameters:

• suggested_only: Optional. If true, return only child events and rooms where the m.space.child event has suggested: true. Must be a boolean, defaults to false.

  This applies transitively, i.e. if a suggested_only is true and a space is not suggested then it should not be searched for children. The inverse is also true, if a space is suggested, but a child of that space is not then the child should not be included.

• limit: Optional: a client-defined limit to the maximum number of rooms to return per page. Must an integer greater than zero.

  Server implementations should impose a maximum value to avoid resource exhaustion.

• max_depth: Optional: The maximum depth in the tree (from the root room) to return. The deepest depth returned will not include children events. Defaults to no-limit. Must be a non-negative integer.

  Server implementations may wish to impose a maximum value to avoid resource exhaustion.

• from: Optional. Pagination token given to retrieve the next set of rooms.

  Note that if a pagination token is provided, then the parameters given for suggested_only and max_depth must be the same.

Response Format

• rooms: [object] For each room/space, starting with the root room, a summary of that room. The fields are the same as those returned by /publicRooms (see spec), with the addition of:
  • room_type: the value of the m.type field from the room's m.room.create event, if any.
  • children_state: The stripped state of the m.space.child events of the room per MSC3173. In addition to the standard stripped state fields, the following is included:
    • origin_server_ts: integer. The origin_server_ts field from the room's m.space.child event. This is required for sorting of rooms as specified below.
• next_batch: Optional string. The token to supply in the from param of the next /hierarchy request in order to request more rooms. If this is absent, there are no more results.

Example request:

GET /_matrix/client/v1/rooms/%21ol19s%3Ableecker.street/hierarchy?
    limit=30&
    suggested_only=true&
    max_depth=4

Example response:

{
    "rooms": [
        {
            "room_id": "!ol19s:bleecker.street",
            "avatar_url": "mxc://bleecker.street/CHEDDARandBRIE",
            "guest_can_join": false,
            "name": "CHEESE",
            "num_joined_members": 37,
            "topic": "Tasty tasty cheese",
            "world_readable": true,
            "join_rules": "public",
            "room_type": "m.space",
            "children_state": [
                {
                    "type": "m.space.child",
                    "state_key": "!efgh:example.com",
                    "content": {
                        "via": ["example.com"],
                        "suggested": true
                    },
                    "room_id": "!ol19s:bleecker.street",
                    "sender": "@alice:bleecker.street",
                    "origin_server_ts": 1432735824653
                },
                { ... }
            ]
        },
        { ... }
    ],
    "next_batch": "abcdef"
}

Errors:

An HTTP response with a status code of 403 and an error code of M_FORBIDDEN should be returned if the user doesn't have permission to view/peek the root room. This should also be returned if that room does not exist, which matches the behavior of other room endpoints (e.g. /_matrix/client/r0/rooms/{roomID}/aliases) to not divulge that a room exists which the user doesn't have permission to view.

An HTTP response with a status code of 400 and an error code of M_INVALID_PARAM should be returned if the from token provided is unknown to the server or if the suggested_only or max_depth parameters are modified during pagination.

Server behaviour

The server should generate the response as discussed above, by doing a depth-first search (starting at the "root" room) for any m.space.child events. Any m.space.child with an invalid via are discarded (invalid is defined as in MSC1772: missing, not an array or an empty array).

In the case of the homeserver not having access to the state of a room, the server-server API (see below) can be used to query for this information over federation from one of the servers provided in the via key of the m.space.child event. It is recommended to cache the federation response for a period of time. The federation results may contain information on a room that the requesting server is already participating in; the requesting server should use its local data for such rooms rather than the data returned over federation.

When the current response page is full, the current state should be persisted and a pagination token should be generated (if there is more data to return). To prevent resource exhaustion, the server may expire persisted data that it deems to be stale.

The persisted state will include:

• The processed rooms.
• Rooms to process (in depth-first order with rooms at the same depth ordered according to MSC1772, as updated to below).
• Room information from federation responses for rooms which have yet to be processed.

Server-server API

The Server-Server API has a similar interface to the Client-Server API, but a simplified response. It is used when a homeserver is not participating in a room (and cannot summarize room due to not having the state).

The main difference is that it does not recurse into spaces and does not support pagination. This is somewhat equivalent to a Client-Server request with a max_depth=1.

Additional federation requests are made to recurse into sub-spaces. This allows for trivially caching responses for a short period of time (since it is not easily known the room summary might have changed).

Since the server-server API does not know the requesting user, the response should divulge information based on if any member of the requesting server could join the room. The requesting server is trusted to properly filter this information using the world_readable, join_rules, and allowed_room_ids fields from the response.

If the target server is not a member of some children rooms (so would have to send another request over federation to inspect them), no attempt is made to recurse into them. They are simply omitted from the children key of the response. (Although they will still appear in the children_statekey of the room.)

Similarly, if a server-set limit on the size of the response is reached, additional rooms are not added to the response and can be queried individually.

Request format

GET /_matrix/federation/v1/hierarchy/{roomID}

Query Parameters:

• suggested_only: The same as the Client-Server API.

Response format

The response format is similar to the Client-Server API:

• room: object The summary of the requested room, see below for details.

• children: [object] For each room/space, a summary of that room, see below for details.

• inaccessible_children: Optional [string]. A list of room IDs which are children of the requested room, but are inaccessible to the requesting server. Assuming the target server is non-malicious and well-behaved, then other non-malicious servers should respond with the same set of inaccessible rooms. Thus the requesting server can consider the rooms inaccessible from everywhere.

  This is used to differentiate between rooms which the requesting server does not have access to from those that the target server cannot include in the response (which will simply be missing in the response).

For both the room and children fields the summary of the room/space includes the fields returned by /publicRooms (see spec), with the addition of:

• room_type: the value of the m.type field from the room's m.room.create event, if any.
• allowed_room_ids: A list of room IDs which give access to this room per MSC3083.¹

Example request:

GET /_matrix/federation/v1/hierarchy/{roomID}?
    suggested_only=true

Errors:

An HTTP response with a status code of 404 and an error code of M_NOT_FOUND is returned if the target server is not a member of the requested room or the requesting server is not allowed to access the room.

MSC1772 Ordering

MSC1772 defines the ordering of "default ordering of siblings in the room list" using the order key:

Rooms are sorted based on a lexicographic ordering of the Unicode codepoints of the characters in order values. Rooms with no order come last, in ascending numeric order of the origin_server_ts of their m.room.create events, or ascending lexicographic order of their room_ids in case of equal origin_server_ts. orders which are not strings, or do not consist solely of ascii characters in the range \x20 (space) to \x7F (~), or consist of more than 50 characters, are forbidden and the field should be ignored if received.

Unfortunately there are situations when a homeserver comes across a reference to a child room that is unknown to it and must decide the ordering. Without being able to see the m.room.create event (which it might not have permission to see) no proper ordering can be given.

Consider the following case of a space with 3 child rooms:

         Space A
           |
  +--------+--------+
  |        |        |
Room B   Room C   Room D

HS1 has users in Space A, Room B, and Room C, while HS2 has users in Room D. HS1 has no users in Room D (and thus has no state from it). Room B, C, and D do not have an order field set (and default to using the ordering rules above).

When a user asks HS1 for the space summary with a limit equal to 2 it cannot fulfill this request since it is unsure how to order Room B, Room C, and Room D, but it can only return 2 of them. It can reach out over federation to HS2 and request a space summary for Room D, but this is undesirable:

• HS1 might not have the permissions to know any of the state of Room D, so might receive a 404 error.
• If we expand the example above to many rooms than this becomes expensive to query a remote server simply for ordering.

This proposes changing the ordering rules from MSC1772 to the following:

Rooms are sorted based on a lexicographic ordering of the Unicode codepoints of the characters in order values. Rooms with no order come last, in ascending numeric order of the origin_server_ts of their m.space.child events, or ascending lexicographic order of their room_ids in case of equal origin_server_ts. orders which are not strings, or do not consist solely of ascii characters in the range \x20 (space) to \x7E (~), or consist of more than 50 characters, are forbidden and the field should be ignored if received.

This modifies the clause for calculating the order to use the origin_server_ts of the m.space.child event instead of the m.room.create event. This allows for a defined sorting of siblings based purely on the information available in the state of the space while still allowing for a natural ordering due to the age of the relationship.

Potential issues

A large flat space (a single room with many m.space.child events) could cause a large federation response.

Room version upgrades of rooms in a space are unsolved and left to a future MSC. When upgrading a room it is unclear if the old room should be removed (in which case users who have not yet joined the new room will no longer see it in the space) or leave the old room (in which case users who have joined the new room will see both). The current recommendation is for clients de-duplicate rooms which are known old versions of rooms in the space.

Alternatives

Peeking to explore the room state could be used to build the tree of rooms/spaces, but this would be significantly more expensive for both clients and servers. It would also require peeking over federation (which is explored in MSC2444).

Security considerations

A space with many sub-spaces and rooms on different homeservers could cause a large number of federation requests. A carefully crafted space with inadequate server enforced limits could be used in a denial of service attack. Generally this is mitigated by enforcing server limits and caching of responses.

The requesting server over federation is trusted to filter the response for the requesting user. The alternative, where the requesting server sends the requesting user_id, and the target server does the filtering, is unattractive because it rules out a caching of the result. This does not decrease security since a server could lie and make a request on behalf of a user in the proper space to see the given information. I.e. the calling server must be trusted anyway.

Unstable prefix

During development of this feature it will be available at unstable endpoints.

The client-server API will be: /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc2946/rooms/{roomID}/hierarchy

The server-server API will be: /_matrix/federation/unstable/org.matrix.msc2946/hierarchy/{roomID}

Footnotes

[1]: As a worked example, in the context of MSC3083, consider that Alice and Bob share a server; Alice is a member of a space, but Bob is not. A remote server will not know whether the request is on behalf of Alice or Bob (and hence whether it should share details of restricted rooms within that space).

Consider if the space is modified to include a restricted room on a different server which allows access from the space. When summarizing the space, the homeserver must make a request over federation for information on the room. The response should include the room (since Alice is able to join it). Without additional information the calling server does not know why they received the room and cannot properly filter the returned results.

Note that there are still potential situations where each server individually doesn't have enough information to properly return the full summary, but these do not seem reasonable in what is considered a normal structure of spaces. (E.g. in the above example, if the remote server is not in the space and does not know whether the server is in the space or not it cannot return the room.)↩