How to send message to client through websocket using Spring

Question

I try to use Spring with websocket. I started my investigation with this tutorial.

In my side client I have something like that to initialize the connection to the server :

function connect() {
    var socket = new SockJS('/myphotos/form');
    stompClient = Stomp.over(socket);
    stompClient.connect({}, function(frame) {
        setConnected(true);
        console.log('Connected: ' + frame);
        stompClient.subscribe('/topic/greetings', function(greeting){
            showGreeting(JSON.parse(greeting.body).content);
        });
    });
}

It works great, in my controller I’m able to do my process in the following class :

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/")
public class PhotoController {

    @MessageMapping("/form")
    @SendTo("/topic/greetings")
    public Greeting validate(AddPhotosForm addPhotosForm) {
        return new Greeting("Hello world !");
    }
}

Now what I want to do it’s having a thread sending a message to the client listening on “/topic/greeting”. I wrote my Runnable class like this :

public class FireGreeting implements Runnable {

    private PhotoController listener;

    public FireGreeting(PhotoController listener) {
        this.listener = listener;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            try {
                Thread.sleep( 2000 );
                listener.fireGreeting();
            } catch ( InterruptedException e ) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }   
    }
}

And completed my controller like that :

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/")
public class PhotoController {

    @MessageMapping("/form")
    @SendTo("/topic/greetings")
    public Greeting validate(AddPhotosForm addPhotosForm) {

        // added this part
        FireGreeting r = new FireGreeting( this );
        new Thread(r).start();

        return new Greeting("Hello world !");
    }

    // added this method
    @SendTo("/topic/greetings")
    public Greeting fireGreeting() {
        System.out.println("Fire");
        return new Greeting("Fire");
    }
}

The method PhotoController.fireGreeting is called as I want but nothing happened on the client side. Any suggestions ? Thank you.

Answer 1

I was able to solve my problem thanks to @Boris the Spider. The correct solution is to do something like that :

@Controller @RequestMapping("/") public class PhotoController {      @Autowired     private SimpMessagingTemplate template;      @MessageMapping("/form")     @SendTo("/topic/greetings")     public Greeting validate(AddPhotosForm addPhotosForm) {          FireGreeting r = new FireGreeting( this );         new Thread(r).start();          return new Greeting("Hello world !");     }      public void fireGreeting() {         System.out.println("Fire");         this.template.convertAndSend("/topic/greetings", new Greeting("Fire"));     } } 

Answer 2

A better way to schedule periodic tasks is, as suggested by @Boris the Spider, to use Spring scheduling mechanisms (see this guide).

For the sake of Separation of Concerns, I would also separate scheduled-related code from controller code.

In your case you could use a class like this one:

@Component public class ScheduledTasks {      @Autowired     private SimpMessagingTemplate template;      @Scheduled(fixedRate = 2000)     public void fireGreeting() {         this.template.convertAndSend("/topic/greetings", new Greeting("Fire"));     } } 

And add the @EnableScheduling tag to your Application class.