Unsubscribe a channel process from all its subscriptions in PubSub

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
, ,
1

Hi everyone

I am building a social network with a Presence implementation that goes as follows:

Each user has its own user:id and user_presence:id channels. On joining its own user:id channel, the process:

  • Presence.tracks itself on its own user_presence:id topic
  • PubSub.subscribes to its contacts’ user_presence:id topics

Users now receives presence updates specifically for their contacts.

Now I’m trying to implement Turn off presence tracking, which means a user no longer receives presence updates from anyone, and no longer sends presence updates to anyone. To do so, I need to:

  • Stop tracking current user (solved with Presence.untrack) :white_check_mark:
  • Unsubscribe current user’s channel process from all its contacts’ user_presence:id subscriptions

which requires the list of user_presence:ids the user is subscribed to. So far, I only found it here:

iex(21)> Registry.keys(Chata.PubSub, user_channel_pid)           
["user_presence:2057978151933313024", "user_presence:2057977985293615104",
 "user_presence:2057977985482358784", "user:2057977985293615104"]

I asked on the the GitHub PubSub repo and @chrismccord disrecommended using Registry behind PubSub. However, short of maintaining the list of topics a user is subscribed to in assigns, or separately, (despite that list being available), I can’t think of another way of doing this.

Anyone done something similar before?

1 Like