I am using the Node.js ws
library, to listen to events in user accounts on a 3rd party API. For each user, I open a websocket to listen to the events in the user's account.
Turns out, the 3rd-party API doesn't provide a userID
for each event, so if I have 10 websocket connections to user-accounts, I cannot determine which account an event came from.
I have access to a unique userId
prior to starting each of my connections.
Is there a way to append or wrap the websocket connection with the userId
identifier, to each connection I make, such that when I receive an event, I can access the custom identifier, and subsequently know which user's account the event came from?
The code below is a mix of real code, and pseudocode (i.e customSocket
)
const ws = new WebSocket('wss://thirdparty-api.com/accounts', {
port: 8080,
});
ws.send(
JSON.stringify({
action: 'authenticate',
data: {
oauth_token: access_token,
},
})
);
// wrap and attach data here (pseudocode at top-level)
customSocket.add({userId,
ws.send(
JSON.stringify({
action: 'listen',
data: {
streams: ['action_updates'],
},
})
)
})
// listen for wrapper data here, pseudocode at top level
customSocket.emit((customData) {
ws.on('message', function incoming(data) {
console.log('incoming -> data', data.toString());
})
console.log('emit -> customData', customData);
})
Looking at the socket.io
library, the namespace
feature may solve for this, but I can't determine if that's true or not. Below is an example in their documentation:
// your application has multiple tenants so you want to dynamically create one namespace per tenant
const workspaces = io.of(/^\/\w+$/);
workspaces.on('connection', socket => {
const workspace = socket.nsp;
workspace.emit('hello');
});
// this middleware will be assigned to each namespace
workspaces.use((socket, next) => {
// ensure the user has access to the workspace
next();
});
I found a solution to this which is fairly simple. First create a message handler function:
Then, when you create the websocket for the given user, wrap the
.on
event with the handler: