Return an alternative human readable version of the connection status

[josephwoodward]

Feature Request

Currently the NATS connection status is a constant backed by an iota, this means consumers wishing to write out the connection status as a human readable format (such as logs) requires something like this:

func natsStatus(status nats.Status) string {
	switch status {
	case nats.DISCONNECTED:
		return "DISCONNECTED"
	case nats.CONNECTED:
		return "CONNECTED"
         ...
	default:
		return "unknown status"
	}
}

It would be great if the client library could provide such a functionality to get a human readable version of the connection status.

Proposed Change:

My initial thoughts were perhaps a pointer function such as func (nc *Conn) StatusText() string that returns the uppercase string of the connection status.

Alternative Approaches

Whilst a slightly larger, breaking change - another option is to make it a type like so, which could then implement the Stringer interface.

type direction int

const (
	CONNECTED direction = iota
	DISCONNECTED
)

func (d direction) String() string {
	return [...]string{"CONNECTED", "DISCONNECTED"}[d]
}

[kozlovic]

Or simply do this:

func (s Status) String() string {
	switch s {
	case DISCONNECTED:
		return "DISCONNECTED"
	case CONNECTED:
		return "CONNECTED"
	case CLOSED:
		return "CLOSED"
	case RECONNECTING:
		return "RECONNECTING"
	case CONNECTING:
		return "CONNECTING"
	case DRAINING_SUBS:
		return "DRAINING_SUBS"
	case DRAINING_PUBS:
		return "DRAINING_PUBS"
	}
	return "unknown status"
}

which seem to work:

nc, err := nats.Connect(...)
..
st := nc.Status()
fmt.Printf("status=%s\n", st)

this prints:

status=CONNECTED

[josephwoodward]

@kozlovic Ah yes, of course - that would be much better. Would you be happy for me to contribute this to the client library?

[kozlovic]

@josephwoodward Sure, if you would like!

[kozlovic]

Close by PR #812