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Persisting User Status

This package is forked from following package. The only difference is that this one stores connections in the actual db and doesn't remove them on logout or socket close.

user-status Build Status

Keeps track of user connection state and makes this available in Meteor.users as well as some other objects.

Check out a demo app at http://user-status.meteor.com, or its source.

Help keep your favorite Meteor packages alive! If you depend on this package in your app and find it useful, consider a donation at Gittip for me (or other Meteor package maintainers).

What's this do?

Tracks users that are online and allows you to use them in useful ways, such as rendering the users online box below showing yourself in orange and other online users in green. Also keeps track of the last time a user logged in, and the time login occurred in the current user session:

User online states

Install

Install the smart package using meteorite:

$ mrt add persisting-user-status

Basic Usage - Online State

This package maintains two types of status: a general user online flag in Meteor.users, and some additional data for each session. It uses timesync to maintain the server's time across all clients, regardless of whether they have the correct time.

Meteor.users receives a status field will be updated automatically if the user logs in or logs out, closes their browser, or otherwise disconnects (anonymous users are not tracked.) A user is online if at least one connection with that userId is logged in. It contains the following fields:

  • online: whether there is at least one connection online for this user
  • lastLogin: when this user most recently logged in.
  • idle: whether all connections for this user are idle. Requires idle tracking to be turned on for all connections, as below.
  • lastActivity: if the user was idle, the last time an action was observed.

To make this available on the client, use a reactive cursor, such as by creating a publication on the server:

Meteor.publish "userStatus", ->
  Meteor.users.find { "status.online": true },
    fields: { ... }

or you can use this to do things when users go online and offline (however, usually you should just be as reactive as possible):

Meteor.users.find({ "status.online": true }).observe
  added: (id) ->
    # id just came online
    
  removed: (id) ->
    # id just went offline

You can use a reactive cursor to select online users either in a publish function or a template helper:

Template.foo.usersOnline = ->
  Meteor.users.find({ "status.online": true })

Making this directly available on the client allows for useful template renderings of user state. For example, with something like the following you get the picture above (using bootstrap classes).

<template name="userPill">
    <span class="label {{labelClass}}">{{username}}</span>
</template>

Template.userPill.labelClass = ->
  if @_id is Meteor.userId()
    "label-warning"
  else if @status?.online
    "label-success"
  else ""

Advanced Usage and Idle Tracking

On the client, the UserStatus object provides for seamless automatic monitoring of a client's idle state. By default, it will listen for all clicks and keypresses in window as signals of a user's action. It has the following functions:

  • startMonitor: a function taking an object with fields threshold (the amount of time before a user is counted as idle), interval (how often to check if a client has gone idle), and idleOnBlur (whether to count a window blur as a user going idle.) This function enables idle tracking on the client.
  • stopMonitor: stops the running monitor.
  • pingMonitor: if the automatic event handlers aren't catching what you need, you can manually ping the monitor to signal that a user is doing something.
  • isIdle: a reactive variable signifying whether the user is currently idle or not.
  • isMonitoring: a reactive variable for whether the monitor is running.
  • lastActivity: a reactive variable for the last action recorded by the user (according to server time). Since this variable will be invalidated a lot and cause many recomputations, it's best only used for debugging or diagnostics (as in the demo).

For an example of how the above functions are used, see the demo.

The UserStatus.connections (in-memory) collection contains information for all (logged-in) connections on the server, in the following fields:

  • _id: the connection id
  • userId: the user id
  • ipAddr: the remote address of the client. We don't keep ipAddr in Meteor.users because a user can be logged in from different places.
  • loginTime: when the user logged in with this connection.
  • idle: true if idle monitoring is enabled on this connection and the client has gone idle.

The UserStatus.events object is an EventEmitter on which you can listen for connections logging in and out. Logging out includes closing the browser; reopening the browser will trigger a new login event. The following events are supported:

  • connectionLogin with fields userId, connectionId, and ipAddr
  • connectionLogout with fields userId and connectionId
  • connectionIdle with fields userId, connectionId, and lastActivity
  • connectionActive with fields userId, connectionId, and lastActivity

Check out https://github.com/mizzao/meteor-accounts-testing for a simple accounts drop-in that you can use to test your app - this is also used in the demo.

Testing

There are some Tinytest unit tests that are used to test the logic in this package, but general testing with many users and connections is hard. Hence, we have set up a demo app (http://user-status.meteor.com) for testing that is also hosted as a proof of concept. If you think you've found a bug in the package, try to replicate it on the demo app and post an issue with steps to reproduce.