how to broadcast when out of socket.io loop

Question

I have following code on server side, which does function call on new connection with socket.

var io = require('socket.io').listen(80);

io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {
  socket.broadcast.emit('user connected');
});

now i have another module that takes rest request and it want to broadcast on all open sockets. How can it be done?

Is there any way to use broadcast without socket? like

io.broadcast.emit('user connected');

Edit more like this?

io.sockets.broadcast.to('m1').emit('user message', 'from', 'msg');

Answer 1

Yes, indeed! Just call it on io.sockets.

io.sockets.emit('user connected')

This is pretty much exactly what broadcast does, except that broadcast takes the extra step of excluding itself from the broadcast.

Edit:

To scope to the room, like you've specified, do this:

io.sockets.in('m1').emit('user message', 'from', 'msg');