RTCDataChannel: message event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since January 2020.

The WebRTC message event is sent to the onmessage event handler on an RTCDataChannel object when a message has been received from the remote peer.

Note: The message event uses as its event object type the MessageEvent interface defined by the HTML specification.

This event is not cancelable and does not bubble.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

js
addEventListener("message", (event) => {});

onmessage = (event) => {};

Event type

Event properties

Also inherits properties from its parent interface, Event.

MessageEvent.data Read only

The data sent by the message emitter.

MessageEvent.origin Read only

A string representing the origin of the message emitter.

MessageEvent.lastEventId Read only

A string representing a unique ID for the event.

MessageEvent.source Read only

A reference to the message emitter, one of WindowProxy, MessagePort, or ServiceWorker.

MessageEvent.ports Read only

An array of MessagePort objects representing the ports associated with the channel the message is being sent through (where appropriate, e.g. in channel messaging or when sending a message to a shared worker).

Examples

For a given RTCDataChannel, dc, created for a peer connection using its createDataChannel() method, this code sets up a handler for incoming messages and acts on them by adding the data contained within the message to the current document as a new <p> (paragraph) element.

js
dc.addEventListener(
  "message",
  (event) => {
    let newParagraph = document.createElement("p");
    let textNode = document.createTextNode(event.data);
    newParagraph.appendChild(textNode);

    document.body.appendChild(newParagraph);
  },
  false,
);

We first create the new paragraph element and add the message data to it as a new text node. Then we append the new paragraph to the end of the document's body.

You can also use an RTCDataChannel object's onmessage event handler property to set the event handler:

js
dc.onmessage = (event) => {
  let newParagraph = document.createElement("p");
  let textNode = document.createTextNode(event.data);
  newParagraph.appendChild(textNode);

  document.body.appendChild(newParagraph);
};

Specifications

Specification
WebRTC: Real-Time Communication in Browsers
# event-datachannel-message
WebRTC: Real-Time Communication in Browsers
# dom-rtcdatachannel-onmessage

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
message event

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support

See also