TL;DR - How do I maintain a list of users in each room so that I can send that data to the front-end to display a list of participants in this room.
I'm designing a collaborative web application that uses django-channels for websocket communication between the browser and the server. A room can be joined by more than one user and every user should be aware of every other user in the room. How would I go about achieving this using django-channels (v2)?
I already went through the documentation and a few example projects available online but none of them have added a similar functionality. I also know about django-channels-presence
but the project doesn't seem to be actively maintained so I didn't really bother looking into examples using that.
Here's what I've come up with so far:
- For every room, I create an object in the database and those objects can keep track of the users that are in the room. So for e.g in the WS consumer's connect()
method I could do a get_or_create_room()
call and room.add_participant(self.user_name)
(or fetch this from the scope) and in the disconnect()
method I could remove myself from the room. The problem with this, however, is that I might end up creating race conditions? I think? Also since I'm fetching objects from the ORM, I have to make sure that every time, before using this object I have to re-fetch it from the DB because it can (and will) become outdated quickly. This doesn't seem ideal at all.
- Another way I can think of is attaching data to self.channel_layer
in the consumer where I can do something like setattr(self.channel_layer, f'users_{room_id}', {})
and maintain this dictionary for every user entering and leaving. This again doesn't sound very safe and I didn't see anyone using this so I'm unsure.
Any help regarding this would be appreciated. I'd also like to be able to see how existing applications do this if anyone can point me to one?