Should I be able to push an event to a Phoenix channel from a page controller? (push/3 fails with FunctionClauseError)

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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1

I have a Phoenix app where I want to persist a chat message from the client to the database before sending it to a channel.

In my page controller I have something like this to pick up the event from the client:

  def handle_event("reply", %{"reply" => params}, socket) do

    changeset = Reply.changeset(%Reply{}, params )
    case Repo.insert(changeset) do
      ..
      ..
    end

    Phoenix.Channel.push(socket, "new_reply", %{text: "this is a reply", guid: "123" })

    {:noreply, socket}

The problem is that the push/3 call always fails with the following error:

(FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in Phoenix.Channel.assert_joined!/1
    (phoenix 1.6.10) lib/phoenix/channel.ex:639: Phoenix.Channel.assert_joined!(
    ..
    )
    (phoenix 1.6.10) lib/phoenix/channel.ex:582: Phoenix.Channel.push/3
    (chat 0.1.0) lib/chat_web/controllers/page_controller.ex:259: ChatWeb.MainPage.handle_event/3
    (phoenix_live_view 0.17.10) lib/phoenix_live_view/channel.ex:382: anonymous fn/3 in Phoenix.LiveView.Channel.view_handle_event/3
    (telemetry 1.1.0) /../deps/telemetry/src/telemetry.erl:320: :telemetry.span/3
    (phoenix_live_view 0.17.10) lib/phoenix_live_view/channel.ex:216: Phoenix.LiveView.Channel.handle_info/2
    (stdlib 3.17.2) gen_server.erl:695: :gen_server.try_dispatch/4
    (stdlib 3.17.2) gen_server.erl:771: :gen_server.handle_msg/6
    (stdlib 3.17.2) proc_lib.erl:226: :proc_lib.init_p_do_apply/3

Can anybody tell me what I’m doing wrong? Is there some reason why a page controller can’t push a message to a channel?

Thanks!