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# Requests

Requests made via portal interfaces generally involve user interaction, and dialogs that can stay open for a long time. Therefore portal APIs don’t just use async method calls (which time out after at most 25 seconds), but instead return results via a `Response` signal on Request objects.

Portal APIs don’t use properties very much. This is partially because we need to be careful about the flow of information, and partially because it would be unexpected to have a dialog appear when you just set a property. However, every portal has at least one version property that specifies the maximum version supported by xdg-desktop-portal.

## General Flow

The general flow of the portal API is as follows:

1. The application makes a portal request

2. The portal replies to that method call with a handle (i.e. object path) to a Request object that corresponds to the request

3. The object is exported on the bus and stays alive as long as the user interaction lasts

4. When the user interaction is over, the portal sends a `Response` signal back to the application with the results from the interaction, if any.

To avoid a race condition between the caller subscribing to the signal after receiving the reply for the method call and the signal getting emitted, a convention for Request object paths has been established that allows the caller to subscribe to the signal before making the method call.