Filter messages by presens at client

[redhog]

How to filter messages to a client by the models present on that client? Can this be done in a secure and efficient way?

[JoshMock]

I haven't come up with a solution for that yet. There's an "Account/room-specific events" item on the TODO list in the README which is intended to address this issue.

If you'd like to take a stab at implementing it I'd love your thoughts. Feel free to post ideas on this issue about how we could go about that and we'll discuss!

[redhog]

I wonder if there'd be too much overhead if we just sent messages specifically to each client instead of using broadcast?

I guess it depends on the spread of objects on the different clients. I imagine the most common situation to be a sort of inverse relationship where there are many objects shared by just a few clients each (objects "owned" by some users and changed by them), and very few objects shared by many clients or all clients (status / informational objects, mostly just read by users). Does this sound realistic to you?

[JoshMock]

That's a good observation. There are probably a spectrum of use cases that will have different needs.

I wonder if the client initializer could take an optional second parameter that looks like this:

{
    namespaces: ['foo', 'bar']
}

And then models on that page created with that mixin publish events with an added namespace property that the server side looks for and only broadcasts to those rooms.

[redhog]

Ah, maybe doing it explicitly is smarter actually... But I think that needs to happen on the server side some way for security reasons. Then the question is, can an object only exist in one namespace at a time?

Maybe a simple way to do it, would be to allow models to implement (on the server side) a method allow_read(socket) and another allow_write(socket) (Maybe even a property-level access control). That way a model author could control, using the authentication mechanisms of the app, who, rather than which client, can do what with an object.

That doesn't really handle client-only models though...

As you can see I'm clearly just brainstorming :)