I have a web application which has few charts on dashboard. The data for charts is fetched on document.ready function at client side invoking a WCF service method.
What i want is now to use SignalR in my application. I am really new to SignalR. How can i call WCF methods from SignalR Hub or what you can say is that instead of pulling data from server i want the WCF service to push data to client every one minute.
Is there a way of communication between signalR and WCF service.
Also another approach can be to force client to ask for data from WCF Service every minute.
Any help will be really appreciated.
I have done following as of yet.
Client Side Function on my Dashboard page
<script src="Scripts/jquery.signalR-2.0.3.min.js"></script>
<!--Reference the autogenerated SignalR hub script. -->
<script src="/signalr/hubs"></script>
<a id="refresh">Refresh</a>
$(function() {
var dashboardHubProxy = $.connection.dashboardHub;
$.connection.hub.start().done(function() {
// dashboardHubProxy.server.refreshClient(parameters);
$("#refresh").click(function() {
dashboardHubProxy.server.refreshClient(parameters);
});
});
dashboardHubProxy.client.refreshChart = function (chartData) {
debugger;
DrawChart(chartData, 'Hourly Call Count For Last ' + Duration + ' Days', '#chartHourly', 'StackedAreaChart');
};
});
and my Dashboard Hub class is as follows
public class DashboardHub : Hub
{
private readonly ReportService ReportService = new ReportService();
public void RefreshClient(string parameters)
{
var chartData = ReportService.GenerateHourlyCallsTrendGraphicalReport(parameters);
Clients.All.refreshChart(chartData);
}
}
My SignalR startup class is as follows
[assembly: OwinStartup(typeof(CallsPortalWeb.Startup), "Configuration")]
namespace CallsPortalWeb
{
public static class Startup
{
public static void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
ConfigureSignalR(app);
}
public static void ConfigureSignalR(IAppBuilder app)
{
app.MapSignalR();
}
}
}
When i click on refresh button and a debugger on RefreshClient method on hub the debugger doesn't get to the method which means i am unable to call server side method of SignalR.
Is there anything needs to be done in web.config?
I agree with AD.Net's comment. To elaborate slightly more though, the SignalR hubs can be hosted directly in your web project kinda the same way controllers are used. There is also a package out there so you can host the SignalR library on its own so it can act as a service all on its own. Either way you will need to hit the SignalR hub first as that is how it communicates then you would call your WCF service methods from within the hubs.
Brief explanation
Your HUB will have methods used by both your USER Client and your WCF Client. You may use something like UserConnected() for the user to call in and setup your logging of the connection. Then the WCF service may call your HUB with an UpdateUserStats(Guid connnectionId, UserStats stats) which would in turn call the USER client directly and provide the stats passed in like so Clients.Client(connectionId).updateStats(stats) which in turn would have a method on the USERS client named updateStats() that would handle the received information.
Initial page landing
What AD.Net provided is basic code that will be called when the user lands on the page. At this point you would want to log the ConnectionId related to that user so you can directly contact them back.
First contact with your hub touching WCF
From your Hub, you could call your WCF service as you normally would inside any normal C# code to fetch your data or perform action and return it to your user.
Method of updating the user periodically
SignalR removes the need for your client code to have to continually poll the server for updates. It is meant to allow you to push data out to the client with out them asking for it directly. This is where the persistence of the connections come into play.
You will probably want to create a wrapper to easily send messages to the hub from your application, since you are using WCF I would assume you have your business logic behind this layer so you will want the WCF service reaching out to your Hub whenever action X happens. You can do that by utilizing the Client side C# code as in this case your client is actually the user and the WCF service. With a chat application the other user is basically doing what you want your WCF service to do, which is send a message to the other client.
Usage example
You are running an online store. The dashboard displays how many orders there have been for the day. So you would wire up a call to the hub to send a message out to update the products ordered when a user places a new order. You can do this by sending it to the admin group you have configured and any admins on the dashboard would get the message. Though if these stats are very user specific, you will more then likely instead reach into the database, find the ConnectionId that the user has connected with and send the update message directly to that connectionid.
WCF Client Code Example
Just incase you want some code, this is directly from MS site on connecting with a .net client. You would use this in your WCF service, or wherever in your code you plan on connecting and then sending an update to your user.
var hubConnection = new HubConnection("http://www.contoso.com/");
IHubProxy stockTickerHubProxy = hubConnection.CreateHubProxy("StockTickerHub");
stockTickerHubProxy.On<Stock>("UpdateStockPrice", stock => Console.WriteLine("Stock update for {0} new price {1}", stock.Symbol, stock.Price));
await hubConnection.Start();
Here is a link directly to the .Net Client section: http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/signalr-20/hubs-api/hubs-api-guide-net-client
I am sure you have seen this link but it really holds all the good information you need to get started. http://www.asp.net/signalr
Here is a more direct link that goes into usages with code for you. http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/signalr-20/hubs-api/hubs-api-guide-server
ADDED: Here is a blog specific to Dashboards with SignalR and their polling.
http://solomon-t.blogspot.com/2012/12/signalr-and-interval-polling-for.html
ADDED: Here is a page on managing users signalR connections.
http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/signalr-20/hubs-api/mapping-users-to-connections
Update for your code update
The .Net Client library (in NuGet) gives your .net code access to the hub. Since you are a client you will need to connect to the hub just like the User who is also a client. Your hub would act as the server for this. So with the .Net Client I am assuming you would setup a windows service that would internally poll, or something event based that would call the .Net Client code portion of it which would reach out to your hub. Your hub would take the information provided, more than likely a ConnectionId or GroupId and broad cast the User (which is perhaps on a website so it would be the JS client) a method that would update the front end for the user client. Basically what I mention under "Brief Explanation".
Now, to directly respond to the code you posted. That is Javascript, I would expect a connect like you have done. Updating the chart on initial connection is fine as well. If this is all the code signalR wise though you are missing a client side method to handle the refresh. Technically, instead of calling Clients.Caller.RefreshChart() you could just return that data and use it, which is what your javascript is doing right now. You are returning void but it is expecting a your date.
Now, I would actually say correct your javascript instead of correcting the hub code. Why? Because having a method in JS on your client that is called "refreshChart()" can be reused for when you are having your server reach out and update the client.
So I would recommend, dropping anything that is related to updating the dashboard in your JS done statement. If you want to do a notification or something to the user that is fine but dont update the grid.
Now create a JS client function called "refreshChart", note the lower case R, you can call it with a big R in c# but the js library will lowercase it so when you make the function have it will receive your dashboard information.
Now, on the server polling, or executing on some action, your WCF would call a method on the hub that would be say "UpdateDashboar(connectionId,dashInfo)" and that method would then inside of it call the "refreshChart" just like you are doing in your RefreshClient method, accept instead of doing Clients.Caller you would use Clients.Client(connectionId).refreshChart(chartInfo).
Directly the reason your code is not working is because you need to turn that Void into the type you expect to be returned. If the rest is coded right you will have it update once. You will need to implement the other logic I mentioned if you want it constantly updating. Which is again why I asked about how you are persisting your connections. I added a link to help you with that if you are not sure what I am talking about.
You should use the SignalR Hub to push data to the client. Your hub can consume a WCF service (the same way your client can) to get the data.
from client:
hub.VisitingDashBoard();
on the hub in the VisitingDashBoard method:
var data = wcfClient.GetDashboardData()//may be pass the user id from the context
Clients.Caller.UpdateDashboard(data)
Of course your client will have a handler for UpdateDashboard call
Related
I am using SignalR in a Blazor server-side app. I added the Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR.Client Nuget package (v5.0.11) to the project, and used the following code to create the hub connection...
HubConnection hubConnection = new HubConnectionBuilder()
.WithUrl("url")
.Build();
await hubConnection.StartAsync();
I then send out a message with the following code (Debug.WriteLine added to confirm what's going on)...
Debug.WriteLine($"{DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()} SignalR msg sent");
await hubConnection.SendAsync("Send", "Hello");
The component that is to handle such messages creates the hub connection and hooks up to the On handler as follows...
HubConnection hubConnection = new HubConnectionBuilder()
.WithUrl("url")
.Build();
hubConnection.On<string>("Receive", msg =>
Debug.WriteLine($"{DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()} SignalR msg received - {msg}"));
await hubConnection.StartAsync();
When the message is sent out, it is definitely only being sent once (which I can confirm from the output panel, where I only see the "sent" output once), but it is received twice.
Searching around, it seems that a common reason for this is if jQuery was loaded twice. However, I have checked this, and it's not the case. It's only being loaded the once. Furthermore, one of the other developers on the team tried it, and he got the message received 15 times! Even if we had accidentally included jQuery twice, we certainly didn't include it 15 times. Also, he's using exactly the same code as me (checked out from source control), so we should get the same results if this were the issue.
Anyone any idea why this could be happening? Thanks
This can occur when you initialise a HubConnection within a component and don’t configure IDispose or IAsyncDispose on your component to dispose the HubConnection.
In a Blazor Server-Side application there is already a SignalR host pushing updates to the client.
If you want to push updates from a page you can use a Singleton Service to handle the communication.
If you set up your own SignalR hub and use the SignalR client in your components, your application is something like the diagram below:
As you can see, the client is actually running on the server. The SignalR hub you've added adds processing and memory overhead and does not add any value.
I created a simple sample app that uses a service that clients listen to for updates:
https://github.com/conficient/BlazorServerWithSignalR
I have a .Net Core 2.1 Web API talking to a MySQL database, using the Pomelo provider (version 2.1.0-rc1-final). Because this is a multi-tenant application, the API needs to change databases depending on which tenant is connecting. The front end web app tells the API which tenant is doing the request by including a TenantId header in the HTPP request.
When the API receives an HTTP request from the front end, I have a service in the API's pipeline that reads the TenantId from the request, and then this is used to determine which database the API must connect to.
To connect to various databases, I change the connection string of the DbContext. I do this in the OnConfiguring event:
protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder options)
{
string connectionString = CreateConnectionString();
optionsBuilder.UseMySql(connectionString);
base.OnConfiguring(optionsBuilder);
}
My problem is that this works the first time, but the second time this event fires, when it executes the optionsBuilder.UseMySql(connectionString); line, it throws this exception:
An item with the same key has already been added. Key: Pomelo.EntityFrameworkCore.MySql.Infrastructure.Internal.MySqlOptionsExtension
It's only letting me configure the DbContext once. I need to reconfigure it every time an API action endpoint gets called. Any ideas?
I'm not 100% sure what I did - but it's working now. The process is as follows: I created middleware to identify the tenant making the request (i.e. consuming the API). This is done by reading a "tenantId" that the client app sends in the header of the request, and then saving that tenantId into a global variable (I used HttpContext). Because middleware executes before pretty much most other things, by the time the OnConfiguring event of the dbContext fires, I already know which tenant this is So then, on the OnConfiguring event of the dbContext, I set the connectionString of the dbContext to whatever it should be (depending on the tenantId). I can't post the code in this comment because comments don't allow line breaks and they are too short, but If you want to, send me your email address and I'll email you the code.
I'm looking for some guidance on how to implement authorization security for SignalR on a back end service running in a self-hosted (non-IIS) environment, that is called from a Web application. The backend app is basically a monitor that fires SignalR events back to the HTML based client. This all works fine (amazingly well actually).
However, we need to restrict access to the server for authenticated users from the Web site. So basically if a user is authenticated on the Web site, we need to somehow pick up the crendentials (user name is enough) and validation state in the backend app to decide whether to allow the connection as to avoid unauthorized access.
Can anybody point at some strategies or patterns on how to accomplish this sort of auth forwarding?
I am having similar issues here, as in my web app I use a simple cookie authentication system which uses an AoP style approach to check for any controllers with an attribute, then will get the current context (be it from the static HttpContext.Current or from the target invocation object depending on the type of interceptor) and then verify the cookie exists, it contains right data, then finally verify the token with the db or cache etc.
Anyway this approach can also be used for Signalr, although its a bit more long winded and you are using dependency injection. You would basically wrap the hub calls with the desired attribute, then set up your DI/IoC configuration to intercept these calls, then either get the hub instance within your interceptor and get the cookie (or your custom authentication mechanism) from the request, verify it is all valid or not, and if not then throw a new HttpException("403", "Not authenticated"); which should kick the user out and return back before it even hits your hub method, this way you can put the logic in one place (your interceptor, or a class the interceptor consumes) then just wrap any method that needs to use this authentication using your attribute.
I use Ninject and the interception extension, but most major DI frameworks these days have some form of IoC plugin/extensions, such as Autofac, Windsor, Spring etc.
If you were not happy going down the route of introducing DI and/or AOP to your current project, then maybe you could just create a custom hub instance which contains your authentication logic and then just use that in your hubs, so ok you will still be manually calling some authentication logic from within each hub method you want to protect, but its less code, so something like:
public class AuthorisableHub : Hub
{
private ISomeAuthenticationToken GetSomeAuthenticationTokenFromRequest(Request request) // probably a SignalR specific request object
{
// Get your token from the querystring or cookie etc
}
private bool IsAuthenticationTokenValid(ISomeAuthenticationToken token)
{
// Perform some validation, be it simple or db based and return result
}
protected void PerformUserAuthentication()
{
var token = GetSomeAuthenticationTokenFromRequest(Context.Request);
var isRequestValid = IsAuthenticationTokenValid(token);
if(!isRequestValid)
{ throw new HttpException(403, "<Some forbidden message here>"); }
}
}
public class MyFancyPantsHub : AuthorisableHub
{
public void TellAllClientsSomethingSecret(ISecret secret)
{
PerformUserAuthentication();
// Do stuff with the secret as it should have bombed the user out
// before it reaches here if working correctly
}
}
It is not perfect but would work (I think), also I am sure I once read somewhere that Hubs are newly instantiated for each request, and if this is indeed true, you could possibly just put this logic in your constructor if you want to apply the authentication to every action within the hub.
Hope that helps, or gives you ideas... would be interested in knowing how you did solve it in the end.
SignalR does not provide any additional features for authentication. Instead, it is designed to work with the authentication mechanism of your application.
Hubs
You should do authentication as you normally would and then use the Authorize attribute provided by SignalR to enforce the results of the authentication on the Hubs.
The Authorize attribute can be applied to an entire Hub or particular methods in the Hub. Some examples:
[Authorize] – only authenticated users
[Authorize(Roles = "Admin,Manager")] – only authenticated users in the specified .NET roles
[Authorize(Users = "user1,user2")] – only authenticated users with the specified user names
You can also require all Hubs to require authentication by adding the following method in the Application_Start method:
GlobalHost.HubPipeline.RequireAuthentication();
Persistent Connections
You can use the user object in the request to see if the user is authenticated:
request.User.IsAuthenticated
if I send a request, and I expect the response to come trough SignalR, is it possible to test this using a LoadTest or PerformanceTest in Visual Studio?
Short answer: Yes
I've done this several times in CodedWebTests but it would also be possible to do in a declarative WebTest. You can use a custom PreWebTest Event Handler to create your signalR client and connect to your SignalR hub. What you choose to do with the signalR notification is up to you but I like to save it to the WebTestContext as well as display it on the test results screen using the AddCommentToResult method.
The method below creates a hubConnection invokes the "addToGroup" function on the hub and then tells the client what to do when it receives a message.
using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Client;
public class SignalRPlugin : WebtTestPlugin
{
public override void PreWebTest(object sender, PreWebTestEventArgs e)
{
var hubConnection = new HubConnection("yourSignalRUrl");
var hubProxy = hubConnection.CreateHubProxy("notifications");
hubConnection.Start().Wait();
hubProxy.Invoke("addToGroup", "me");
hubProxy.On<string>("message", s =>
{
e.Webtest.AddCommentToResult(s);
e.Webtest.Context.Add("signalRMessages", s);
});
}
}
Use it by attaching the event handler in your test constructor.
public MyWebTest()
{
PreWebTest += new SignalRPlugin().PreWebTest;
}
Then once you have the signalR messages you can use a custom validation rule to validate that the response was received. Just have a while loop checking the WebTestContext for the "signalRMessages" key. I strongly suggest making sure you add a timeout feature so you are not waiting forever if the messages never come in.
The other option if you are writing CodedWebTests is to create a WaitForNotifications method that basically does the same thing as the validation rule. The advantage with this is that you can use an extraction rule to get data out of the last response and then use that data in validating your signalR messages. If you still need to fail a test in your WaitForNotification method use WebTest.InternalSetOutcome(Outcome.Fail);
The best way to load test a SignalR application is by building on the crank project included in the source.
This is a simple ramp up solution built with the .Net client but it is relatively easy to modify to call whatever hub methods you require and to analyse the responses.
You can always attach the Visual Studio profiler to your iis express instance to get detailed profiling data if required.
I'm trying to find examples on how to get real time updates using a web service in ASP.NET MVC (Version doesn't matter) and posting it back to a specific user's browser window.
A perfect example would be a type of chat system like that of facebooks' where responses are send to the appropriate browser(client) whenever a message has been posted instead of creating a javascript timer on the page that checks for new messages every 5 seconds. I've heard tons of times about types of sync programs out there, but i'm looking for this in code, not using a third party software.
What i'm looking to do specifically:
I'm trying to create a web browser chat client that is SQL and Web Service based in ASP.NET MVC. When you have 2-4 different usernames logged into the system they chat and send messages to each other that is saved in an SQL database, then when there has been a new entry (or someone sent a new message) the Web Service see's this change and then shows the receiving user the new updated message. E.G Full Chat Synced Chat using a Web Service.
The thing that really stomps me in general is I have no idea how to detect if something new is added to an SQL table, and also I have no idea how to send information from SQL to a specific user's web browser. So if there are people userA, userB, userC all on the website, i don't know how to only show a message to userC if they are all under the username "guest". I would love to know hot to do this feature not only for what i'm trying to create now, but for future projects as well.
Can anyone point me into the right direction please? I know SQL pretty well, and web services i'm intermediate with.
You can use SignalR for this task.
Via Scott Hanselman:
Create Asp.net mvc empty application
install nuget package of SignalR
Add new Controller (as example HomeController):
public class HomeController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Index()
{
return View();
}
}
Create view Index with javascript references:
#Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.6.4.min.js")"
"#Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.signalR.js")"
and function:
$(function () {
var hub = $.connection.chatHub;
hub.AddMessage = function (msg) {
$('#messages').append('<li>' + msg + '</li>');
};
$.connection.hub.start().done(function() {
$('#send').click(function() {
hub.send($('#msg').val());
});
});
});
Create class ChatHub:
public class ChatHub:Hub
{
public void Send(string message)
{
Clients.AddMessage(message);
}
}