Django Channels

Question

I've little question about Django Channels, WebSockets, and chat applications. Serving with google gets me to chatrooms, where people can connect and start a chat. But I don't know how one user can send another user instant message.

For example:

1) I add John to friends, and want to start chat. 2) On server side I can generate object Room, with me and John as members. 3) When I send message via WebSocket to this room, I know for who this message is, but I don't know how to get John's channel

@channel_session_user_from_http
def ws_connect(message):
    rooms_with_user = Room.objects.filter(members=message.user)
    for r in rooms_with_user:
        Group('%s' % r.name).add(message.reply_channel)

@channel_session_user
def ws_receive(message):
    prefix, label = message['path'].strip('/').split('/')

    try:
        room = Room.objects.get(name=label)
    except Exception, e:
        room = Room.objects.create(name=get_random_string(30))
        for u in message.chmembers:
            room.members.add(u)
            # here can be somethis like this
            # try
            reply_channel = Channels.objects.get(online=True, user=u)
            Group('%s' % r.name).add(reply_channel)
    Group('%s' % room.name).send({
        "text": "%s : %s" % (message.user.username, message['text']),
    })

@channel_session_user
def ws_disconnect(message):
    prefix, label = message['path'].strip('/').split('/')
    Group(label).discard(message.reply_channel)

Answer 1

Simply make "automatic unique rooms" for user pairs. The rest stays the same. For example like this

def get_group_name(user1, user2):
    return 'chat-{}-{}'.format(*sorted([user1.id, user2.id]))

Give it two user objects, and it returns a unique room for that pair of users, ordered the User.id, something like "chat-1-2" for the users with User.id "1" and "2".

That way, a user can connect with more than one logged-in device and still get the messages sent between the two users.

You can get the authenticated user's object from message.user.

For the receiving User object, I'd just sent the username along with the message. Then you can unpack it from the message['text'] the same way you unpack the actual message.

payload = json.loads(message.content['text'])
msg = payload['msg']
sender = message.user
receiver = get_object_or_404(User, username=payload['receiver'])
# ... here you could check if they have required permission ...
group_name = get_group_name(sender, receiver)
response = {'msg': msg}
Group(group_name).send({'text': json.dumps(response)})
# ... here you could persist the message in a database ...

So with that, you can drop all the "room" things from your example, including the room table etc. Because group names are always created on-the-fly when a message is send between two users.

---

Another important thing: One user will connect later than the other user, and may miss initial messages. So when you connect, you probably want to check some "chat_messages" database table, fetch the last 10 or 20 messages between the user pair, and send those back. So users can catch up on their past conversation.