how can I make private chat rooms with sockjs?

Question

I am trying to make a chat system where only two users are able to talk to each other at a time ( much like facebook's chat )

I've tried multiplexing, using mongoDB's _id as the name so every channel is unique.

The problem I'm facing is that I cannot direct a message to a single client connection.

this is the client side code that first sends the message

$scope.sendMessage = function() {
  specificChannel.send(message)
  $scope.messageText = '';
};

this is the server side receiving the message

specificChannel.on('connection', function (conn) {
  conn.on('data', function(message){
    conn.write('message') 
  }
}

When I send a message, to any channel, every channel still receives the message.

How can I make it so that each client only listens to the messages sent to a specific channel?

Answer 1

It appeared that SockJS doesn't support "private" channels. I used the following solution for a similar issue:

var channel_id = 'my-very-private-channel'
var connection = new SockJS('/pubsub', '')

connection.onopen = function(){
    connection.send({'method': 'set-channel', 'data': {'channel': channel_id}})
}

Backend solution is specific for every technology stack so I can't give a universal solution here. General idea is the following:

1) Parse the message in "on_message" function to find the requested "method name"

2) If the method is "set-channel" -> set the "self.channel" to this value

3) Broadcast further messages to subscribers with the same channel (I'm using Redis for that, but it also depends on your platform)

Hope it helps!