Push and asynchronous methods
Push and asynchronous methods
Push
Skyve provides methods to support pushing to user conversations.
Push can be useful for:
- notifying a user that a long running job is complete
- notifying a user of another action occurring in the system which may impact on their current activity
- chaining another action to occur after an action is complete
- updating the current user view as a result of one of the above
| Push methods | Description |
|---|---|
| growl() | display a popup message to the user(s) |
| message() | display a modal dialog with ok button |
| rerender() | cause the current view to rerender |
| user() | limit push to a specified user |
| execute() | execute an action |
For example, to notify the current user using a growl message that Task X has failed:
User userToNotify = CORE.getUser();
EXT.push(new PushMessage().user(user).growl(MessageSeverity.error, "Task X has failed"));
In the above example, the user() method is used to limit the push to the specified user.
The WebContext also provides a growl convenience method, for example:
webContext.growl(MessageSeverity.info, SENT_SUCCESSFULLY_MESSAGE);
The WebContext growl() method will only provide a growl to the webContext, whereas EXT.push can provide a growl to all currently logged in users (or a specified user).
Broadcast message
The Push method can be used to broadcast messages, growls or rerender to all current conversations, for example:
EXT.push(new PushMessage().growl(MessageSeverity.warn, "System will be offline for maintenance in 5 minutes..."));
Rerender considerations
When using the rerender() method for push actions, the developer needs to consider the impact this may have on the user, who may experience disruption - for example, if they are in the process of data entry.
Consider the use case of a simple team discussion/chat application. Users post messages and while they do this, other user messages appear in the chat history.
The following action would post a message to the topic history and update the history of discussion items for all users.
@Override
public ServerSideActionResult<Topic> execute(Topic bean, WebContext webContext) throws Exception {
TopicMessage tm = TopicMessage.newInstance();
tm.setTopic(bean);
tm.setMessageText(bean.getNewMessage());
tm.setPosted(new Timestamp());
tm.setUser(ModulesUtil.currentAdminUser());
CORE.getPersistence().upsertBeanTuple(tm);
EXT.push(new PushMessage().rerender());
return new ServerSideActionResult<>(bean); // stay on the same form
}
To avoid disrupting ongoing user data entry (another user entering their next chat item), you can take advantage of PrimeFaces remoteCommand tag and update property in a custom xhtml page, as follows:
<p:remoteCommand name="pushRerender" actionListener="#{skyve.rerender('push', false)}" process="@this" update="msgHistory" />
<s:view module="#{skyve.bizModuleParameter}"
document="#{skyve.bizDocumentParameter}"
managedBean="skyve" widgetId="topicHistory" id="msgHistory" />
<s:view module="#{skyve.bizModuleParameter}"
document="#{skyve.bizDocumentParameter}"
managedBean="skyve" widgetId="topicAdd" />
In the above extract, the customised view contains two view tags - each with a unique widgetId drawn from the view declaration in the document view edit.xml. The remoteCommand tag specifies that push messages will only update the component with id=msgHistory. This would allow the user to continue entering data in the topicAdd view component without disruption while the topicHistory section of the view is updated.
Note that the EXT.push method does not specify a user - and so is effectively a broadcast push to all user conversations.
For more information on view declaration and update, see
View update property.
Next Charts
Previous Skyve persistence mechanisms