What is the best practice to handle seen/unseen messages in a chat room application based on Nodejs/SocketIO/React.
Consider User1 sends a message to a room. If another user has seen that message, notify all users that the state of message has been seen.
In my opinion using message brokers can be the better solution instead socket. I actually think that socket should only handle chat messages that are synchronously. but for seen/unseen status I prefer message brokers that are asynchronous. Are there any solutions or best practice in large scale applications?
It's unclear what you have currently tried, meaning that I can only advise solutions in order to achieve your aim.
To firstly identify that a message was seen, IntersectionObserver is an inbuilt API that detects when an element has entered the viewport, meaning that it is visible, therefore; obviously seen. I have added comments in the code below where you should add a function to call to the server that the message was seen, however, that's up to you to implement.
const observer = new window.IntersectionObserver(([entry]) => {
if (entry.isIntersecting) {
// Send a message to the server that the user has viewed the message.
// Eg. socket.emit('read-message', message.id)
return
}
}, {
root: null,
threshold: 0.1,
})
observer.observe(document.getElementById(message.id));
Additionally, there's no need to use message broker, as socket.io can handle simple interactions such as this.
You then need to send a message to the server that denotes the specified message ID was seen, then broadcast to every other client that the state was changed, and update it to read - if that's needed.
Related
I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong, I expected MassTransit would automatically register ReceiveEndpoints in the EndpointConvention.
Sample code:
services.AddMassTransit(x =>
{
x.AddServiceBusMessageScheduler();
x.AddConsumersFromNamespaceContaining<MyNamespace.MyRequestConsumer>();
x.UsingAzureServiceBus((context, cfg) =>
{
// Load the connection string from the configuration.
cfg.Host(context.GetRequiredService<IConfiguration>().GetValue<string>("ServiceBus:ConnectionString"));
cfg.UseServiceBusMessageScheduler();
// Without this line I'm getting an error complaining about no endpoint convention for x could be found.
EndpointConvention.Map<MyRequest>(new Uri("queue:queue-name"));
cfg.ReceiveEndpoint("queue-name", e =>
{
e.MaxConcurrentCalls = 1;
e.ConfigureConsumer<MyRequestConsumer>(context);
});
cfg.ConfigureEndpoints(context);
});
});
I thought this line EndpointConvention.Map<MyRequest>(new Uri("queue:queue-name")); wouldn't be necessary to allow sending to the bus without specifing the queue name, or am I missing something?
await bus.Send<MyRequest>(new { ...});
The EndpointConvention is a convenience method that allows the use of Send without specifying the endpoint address. There is nothing in MassTransit that will automatically configured this because, frankly, I don't use it. And I don't think anyone else should either. That stated, people do use it for whatever reason.
First, think about the ramifications - if every message type was registered as an endpoint convention, what about messages that are published and consumed on multiple endpoints? That wouldn't work.
So, if you want to route messages by message type, MassTransit has a feature for that. It's called Publish and it works great.
But wait, it's a command, and commands should be Sent.
That is true, however, if you are in control of the application and you know that there is only one consumer in your code base that consumes the KickTheTiresAndLightTheFires message contract, publish is as good as send and you don't need to know the address!
No, seriously dude, I want to use Send!
Okay, fine, here are the details. When using ConfigureEndpoints(), MassTransit uses the IEndpointNameFormatter to generate the receive endpoint queue names based upon the types registered via AddConsumer, AddSagaStateMachine, etc. and that same interface can be used to register your own endpoint conventions if you want to use Send without specifying a destination address.
You are, of course, coupling the knowledge of your consumer and message types, but that's your call. You're already dealing with magic (by using Send without an explicit destination) so why not right?
string queueName = formatter.Consumer<T>()
Use that string for the message types in that consumer as a $"queue:{queueName}" address and register it on the EndpointConvention.
Or, you know, just use Publish.
If I have multiple processes and am using socket.io-redis, when I do io.to(room).emit(namespace, message); is this handled seamlessly and efficiently? Or am I misunderstanding socket.io-redis's role?
Hi in short as far as I know about this is-
io.to('room').emit('namespace', 'message');
Means, sending message named 'namespace' with value 'message' to all clients in 'room' channel, including sender.
Detail info (found in here)-
// send to current request socket client
socket.emit('message', "this is a test");// Hasn't changed
// sending to all clients, include sender
io.sockets.emit('message', "this is a test"); // Old way, still compatible
io.emit('message', 'this is a test');// New way, works only in 1.x
// sending to all clients except sender
socket.broadcast.emit('message', "this is a test");// Hasn't changed
// sending to all clients in 'game' room(channel) except sender
socket.broadcast.to('game').emit('message', 'nice game');// Hasn't changed
// sending to all clients in 'game' room(channel), include sender
io.sockets.in('game').emit('message', 'cool game');// Old way, DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE
io.in('game').emit('message', 'cool game');// New way
io.to('game').emit('message', 'cool game');// New way, "in" or "to" are the exact same: "And then simply use to or in (they are the same) when broadcasting or emitting:" from http://socket.io/docs/rooms-and-namespaces/
// sending to individual socketid, socketid is like a room
io.sockets.socket(socketid).emit('message', 'for your eyes only');// Old way, DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE
socket.broadcast.to(socketid).emit('message', 'for your eyes only');// New way
Even more can be found here.
Basic-
Actually the thing is your question is so sort that it is very difficult for others to understand what u exactly need. So, I assume u need to know basic concepts behind this also. So I am adding this part also for your kind info.
The concept here with socket.io with Redis is u should manage connection with socket and store the data in redis as DB.
Redis normally used for applying a layer upon DB (or caching database) so that some data can be stored for a time interval. So between that time, if any query is needed, data will come from Redis, not from DB query.
This system is applied for performance tuning so that your system can handle a huge load at the same time.
In your case, u can cache data for a short time interval for sending the messages through socket.io.
More can be found here-
http://notjoshmiller.com/socket-io-rooms-and-redis/
http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/136/Horizontally-Scaling-Node.js-and-WebSockets-with-Redis
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-redis/issues/98
Think this answer will surely help u.
I'm looking to develop a chat application with Pubnub where I want to make sure all the chat messages that are send is been stored in the database and also want to send messages in chat.
I found out that I can use the Parse with pubnub to provide storage options, But I'm not sure how to setup those two in a way where the messages and images send in the chat are been stored in the database.
Anyone have done this before with pubnub and parse? Are there any other easy options available to use with pubnub instead of using parse?
Sutha,
What you are seeking is not a trivial solution unless you are talking about a limited number of end users. So I wouldn't say there are no "easy" solutions, but there are solutions.
The reason is your server would need to listen (subscribe) to every chat channel that is active and store the messages being sent into your database. Imagine your app scaling to 1 million users (doesn't even need to get that big, but that number should help you realize how this can get tricky to scale where several server instances are listening to channels in a non-overlapping manner or with overlap but using a server queue implementation and de-duping messages).
That said, yes, there are PubNub customers that have implemented such a solution - Parse not being the key to making this happen, by the way.
You have three basic options for implementing this:
Implement a solution that will allow many instances of your server to subscribe to all of the channels as they become active and store the messages as they come in. There are a lot of details to making this happen so if you are not up to this then this is not likely where you want to go.
There is a way to monitor all channels that become active or inactive with PubNub Presence webhooks (enable Presence on your keys). You would use this to keep a list of all channels that your server would use to pull history (enable Storage & Playback on your keys) from in an on-demand (not completely realtime) fashion.
For every channel that goes active or inactive, your server will receive these events via the REST call (and endpoint that you implement on your server - your Parse server in this case):
channel active: record "start chat" timetoken in your Parse db
channel inactive: record "end chat" timetoken in your Parse db
the inactive event is the kickoff for a process that uses start/end timetokens that you recorded for that channel to get history from for channel from PubNub: pubnub.history({channel: channelName, start:startTT, end:endTT})
you will need to iterate on this history call until you receive < 100 messages (100 is the max number of messages you can retrieve at a time)
as you retrieve these messages you will save them to your Parse db
New Presence Webhooks have been added:
We now have webhooks for all presence events: join, leave, timeout, state-change.
Finally, you could just save each message to Parse db on success of every pubnub.publish call. I am not a Parse expert and barely know all of its capabilities but I believe they have some sort or store local then sync to cloud db option (like StackMob when that was a product), but even if not, you will save msg to Parse cloud db directly.
The code would look something like this (not complete, likely errors, figure it out or ask PubNub support for details) in your JavaScript client (on the browser).
var pubnub = PUBNUB({
publish_key : your_pub_key,
subscribe_key : your_sub_key
});
var msg = ... // get the message form your UI text box or whatever
pubnub.publish({
// this is some variable you set up when you enter a chat room
channel: chat_channel,
message: msg
callback: function(event){
// DISCLAIMER: code pulled from [Parse example][4]
// but there are some object creation details
// left out here and msg object is not
// fully fleshed out in this sample code
var ChatMessage = Parse.Object.extend("ChatMessage");
var chatMsg = new ChatMessage();
chatMsg.set("message", msg);
chatMsg.set("user", uuid);
chatMsg.set("channel", chat_channel);
chatMsg.set("timetoken", event[2]);
// this ChatMessage object can be
// whatever you want it to be
chatMsg.save();
}
error: function (error) {
// Handle error here, like retry until success, for example
console.log(JSON.stringify(error));
}
});
You might even just store the entire set of publishes (on both ends of the conversation) based on time interval, number of publishes or size of total data but be careful because either user could exit the chat and the browser without notice and you will fail to save. So the per publish save is probably best practice if a bit noisy.
I hope you find one of these techniques as a means to get started in the right direction. There are details left out so I expect you will have follow up questions.
Just some other links that might be helpful:
http://blog.parse.com/learn/building-a-killer-webrtc-video-chat-app-using-pubnub-parse/
http://www.pubnub.com/blog/realtime-collaboration-sync-parse-api-pubnub/
https://www.pubnub.com/knowledge-base/discussion/293/how-do-i-publish-a-message-from-parse
And we have a PubNub Parse SDK, too. :)
I've created a real time game for Google Play Game Services. It's in the later alpha stages right now. I have a question about sendReliableMessage. I've noticed certain cases where the other peer doesn't receive the message. I am aware that there is a callback onRealTimeMessageSent and I have some code in my MainActivity:
#Override
public void onRealTimeMessageSent(int i, int i2, String s) {
if(i== GamesStatusCodes.STATUS_OK)
{
}
else
{
lastMessageStatus=i;
sendToast("lastMessageStatus:"+Integer.toString(lastMessageStatus));
}
}
My games render loop is checking every iteration the value of lastMessageStatus and if there was something other than STATUS_OK I'm painting a T-Rex right now.
My question is is checking the sent status really enough? I also could create source code where the sender has to wait for an Acknowledged message. Each message would be stamped with a UUID and if ack is not received within a timeout then the sender would send the message again? Is an ACK based system necessary to create a persistent connection?
I've noticed certain cases where there is some lag before the opposite peer received the reliable message and I was wondering is there a timeout on the sendReliable message? Google Play Services documentation doesn't seem to indicate in the documentation that there is a timeout at all.
Thank you
Reliable messages are just that, reliable. There are not a lot of use cases for the onRealTimeMessageSent callback for reliable messages because, as you said, it does not guarantee that the recipient has processed the message yet. Only that it was sent.
It may seem annoying, but an ACK-based system is the best way to know for sure that your user has received the message. A UUID is one good way to do this. I have done this myself and found it to work great (although now you have round-trip latency).
As far as timeout, that is not implemented in the RealTime Messaging API. I have personally found round trip latency (send message, receive ACK in callback) to be about 200ms, and I have never found a way to make a message fail to deliver eventually even when purposefully using bad network conditions.
I'm writing a multiplayer chess game, and using Pusher for the websocket server part.
Anyways, if I have a list of users, and I select any one of them and challenge them, how do I send challenge to just that one user? I know I would use the client event like:
channel.trigger("client-challenge_member1", {some : "data"});
But this event would have to have already been created I think. So do I create this event dynamically after each member subscribes? as possibly in:
channel.bind("pusher:subscribed_completed", function(member) // not sure of correct syntax but...
{
channel.bind("client-challenge_" + member.memberID, function(data)
{
alert(data.Name + " is challenging you.");
});
});
I would think there'd be a overloaded method for trigger, like:
channel.trigger(eventName, data, memberID)
But I cannot see anything like this. Any ideas? Thanks.
I ran into this problem on my application. At this time Pusher does not provide methods for sending events to a specific user. I think the approach that you mentioned would work for your situation. For my application I had each user subscribe to a channel with their user id as the channel id, then I could send messages to a single user through that channel.
client = new Pusher(PUSHER_API_KEY);
channel = client.subscribe(user_id);
channel.bind('my_event',function(data){
//Do stuff
});
I talked this approach over with the pusher team and they assured me there was no real overhead in having the extra channels. The new Pusher() command is the code that creates a new socket connection so you don't have to worry about extra sockets per channel or anything like that. Hope this helps.
I'm from Pusher. As Braden says, you can easily make a channel per user. This is more efficient than having the user id in the event name which means you spam everyone with useless messages.
This is an area we want to improve on further, so thanks for the feedback.
If you're able to consider another service, Beaconpush has the ability to send messages to a specific user.
From their site:
POST /1.0.0/[API key]/users/[user]