Automatic channel messages

I’m not quite sure if it really helps you, but there is quantum available at hex.pm, perhaps it may help you.

A quick and dirty solution which comes to my mind using it, were to have a function which connects to the channel, sends the message and leaves the channel again.

A much saner way, were to start a GenServer (or similar) with your app, which does connect to the channel and gets a message from quantum and on this message it gets translated into the channel message and then send. But I’m not quite sure, how GenServer-messages and Channel-messages behave alltogether.

Thanks for the suggestion NobbZ

Someone on Slack linked http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32085258/how-to-run-some-code-every-few-hours-in-phoenix-framework from which I got the following solution using a GenServer

I created a new file in /lib/myapp/update_users.ex

defmodule MyApp.UpdateUsers do
  use GenServer
  import Ecto
  import Ecto.Query, only: [from: 1, from: 2]

  def start_link do
    GenServer.start_link(__MODULE__, %{})
  end

  def init(state) do
    Process.send_after(self(), :work, 5_000) # In 5 seconds
    {:ok, state}
  end

  def handle_info(:work, state) do
    #get data here.  I also set the start_id from the state or set it to 0

    MyApp.Endpoint.broadcast("updates:activities", "activities", %{source: a.source, points: a.points, name: a.name})

    # Start the timer again
    Process.send_after(self(), :work, 5_000) # In 5 seconds

    #pass the max_id into the state so we can skip previously seen data in next iteration
    {:noreply, %{"last_id" => max_id}}
  end
end

Then added

worker(MyApp.UpdateUsers,[])

into lib/myapp.ex in the start/2 method and it seems to work a charm