Ejabberd with Stream management (XEP-198) not using offline message hook - xmpp

We are developing an app with a chat feature. We have an ejabberd (15.02) configured to use mod_offline_post to use the offline message hook and forward all messages for offline clients to an url of our own which then forwards to the GCM.
However as we are developing an app, we also need XEP-198 (stream management) enabled to handle connection loss. This is working fine in itself. Streams are created and resumed, messages are acknowledged.
The problem is, that the jabber is waiting for a stream to resume and is not forwarding any offline messages to the offline message hook and thus to our mod and post url. It is storing them in its offline storage of course and they get delivered when the recipient resumes its stream.
Is there any way to configure the jabber to call the offline message hook while ejabberd_c2s:fsm_next_state:2517 Waiting for resumption of stream for... ?
PS: We use smack on the client side to provide stream management

In my understanding the behaviour of ejabberd is correct from the XMPP specification point of view. It is doing the right thing and should not in that case forward message to the offline store, because you are not offline technically.
It is just not the right place to place your push processing.

Related

How to receive message stanza without sending self presence?

I am using mongooseim with Android and Ios application. I just want to receive message from the server from background without sending self presence to anyone because this task is done by system. But I can't receive message stanza until I send my presence to the mongooseIM.
Do I missing something or there is a way by which I can get quick update from MongooseIM server in the background without sending presence?
As far as I understand you all you want to do is sync the messages when you receive a Push Notification. MongooseIM can be configured to serve a simple HTTP API with which you can get archived messages (mod_mam needs to be enabled) without establishing the XMPP connection. More details can be found in the HTTP API doc, especially the Swagger doc regarding get messages. Let me know if this suites you.

Ejabberd Message delivery while application is terminated

I am developing a chat app using ejabberd server for both IOS and Android. I also wrote a module for ejabberd to get the offline messages sent to my own server api .
my own server api will send notifications to the IOS/Android platforms using FCM.
On the client side , if the application is in the foreground or the background , it will stay connected to ejabberd and if the client receives the message then ejabberd will send the message delivery status.
I am facing an issue while the app is terminated ( service is not running ) which means it is not connected to ejabberd (offline) . if i send a message to this app while it is not terminated , it will receive a notification but the message still undelivered . how can mark the messages as delivered when receiving the notification while the app is terminated.
to explain it more , the same functionality is working fine with whatsapp :
device A has whatsapp installed and whatsapp was turned off (terminated)
Device B has whatsapp running
Device B sends a message to device A
Device A receives a whatsapp notification
Without doing anything on Device A , the message status on Device B is marked as delivered .
How can I implement this scenario with ejabberd ?
In case someone went into this issue , here is the solution that I implemented with help of #Mickaël Rémond from his answer.
I configured ejabberd to send the offline messages to an http service ( your own server) please refer to this link for further on how to do it
your server should catch the above call and generate a notification message (FCM ) in my case and send it to recipient device
recipient device will catch the notification which includes the message
recipient device will call http service (your own server backend)that responsible for sending the deliver ack to the original sender . you need to pass from, to , stanzaId , vhost with this call
backend server will use ejabberd-api (set of exposed apis to manage ejabberd through rest apis calls) to send delivery message using this api
please note the following notes also :
sending the delivery message from your own server to ejabberd will not delete them from ejabberd database
if the user re-connected to the ejabberd server then the recipient will receive the message again from ejabberd .
It is probably too complex for a simple Stack Overflow question, as you need to integrate several moving part on client and server:
You need to execute code in background when receiving push notifications on iOS (you need that property set on your app in your app provisioning profile and have code to handle that). The client will initiate an HTTPS query to let the server know that the message was delivered.
You need to have an endpoint that will get the delivered HTTPS calls and generate either a message ack or a chat marker on behalf of the user and route it in ejabberd.
In real world, this is not enough if you want to take into account the fact that you can only have 1 push in the queue on APNS. If you have several messages sent while the device is not on the network, you will need to have the device check all received messages while offline on the server, otherwise you will lose messaging.
You need to rely on XMPP Message Archive Management (MAM) to handle that history.
As you see, this is not a simple few tens of line of codes but need real design and involved work.

swift HTTP Requests

I have created an instant messenger chat application where by messages are posted to my server via a php service and stored in a mysql backed.
If a user has their 'inbox' page open and a new message is received I would need to update the table to show any new messages. The way I am doing this at the moment is by sending an http request to the server every 5 seconds.
As you can imagine this is pretty inefficient. What methods are available which would be more suitable and less resource heavy?
I have looked at keep alive connections and web sockets but Im not sure which direction I should be going in?
any help much appreciated!
Your approach is called polling, which is not efficient because it consumes more electricity from your phone and you have extra load to your server. The correct way of doing it is though Apple's push notification. Here is the tutorial for that. Basically your server will send request to Apple's push notification center when a new message is received.
However in your case it's a bit more complicated. You want this notification only after user entering the mail page. So you need to tweak your php server to send notification only after user entered the mail page. In this case you are sending only one request to your server telling it to start sending notifications, instead of constantly polling your server

XMPP offline message push ejabberd

Hi I am developing a chat application using XMPP. Consider the situation in the chat application, When User A send messages to User B and if the User B is offline at that time XMPP will store the sms as offline message and it will send that messages to User B when it comes online. This is working here. But I want to send this offline messages from XMPP as push to User B. I have done lots of searching and I came in a conclusion that we need to send the offline messages from XMPP server to our backend server and from there we need to send that message as push. But how to do this, please help me
It is possible to write a custom module to do that with ejabberd API.
What you need is to use mod_offline_hook (see ejabberd Events and Hooks) to be called when the server wants to store a message in offline store.
You can read mod_offline module for inspiration.

Send XMPP message without starting a chat

I am basically writing a XMPP client to automatically reply to "specific" chat messages.
My setup is like this:
I have pidgin running on my machine configured to run with an account x#xyz.com.
I have my own jabber client configured to run with the same account x#xyz.com.
There could be other XMPP clients .
Here is my requirement:
I am trying to automate certain kind of messages that I receive on gtalk. So whenever I receive a specific message eg: "How are you" , my own XMPP client should reply automatically with say "fine". How are you". All messages sent (before and after my client replies) to x#xyz.com but should be received by all clients (my own client does not have a UI and can only respond to specific messages.).
Now I have already coded my client to reply automatically. This works fine. But the problem I am facing is that as soon as I reply (I use the smack library), all subsequent messages that are sent to x#xyz.com are received only by my XMPP client. This is obviously a problem as my own client is quite dump and does not have a UI, so I don't get to see the rest of the messages sent to me, thereby making me "lose" messages.
I have observed the same behavior with other XMPP clients as well. Now the question is, is this is a requirement of XMPP (I am sorry but I haven't read XMPP protocol too well). Is it possible to code an XMPP client to send a reply to a user and still be able to receive all subsequent messages in all clients currently listening for messages? Making my client a full fledged XMPP client is a solution, but I don't want to go that route.
I hope my question is clear.
You may have to set a negative presence priority for your bot..
First thing to know is that in XMPP protocol every client is supposed to have a full JID. This is a bare JID - in your case x#xyz.com with a resource in the end e.g. x#xyz.com/pidgin or x#xyz.com/home (where /pidgin and /home are the resource). This is a part of how routing messages to different clients is supposed to be achieved.
Then there are the presence stanzas. When going online a client usually sends a presence stanza to the server. This informs about e.g. if the client is available for chat or away for lunch. Along with this information can be sent a priority. When there are more than one clients connected the one with the highest priority will receive the messages sent to the bare JID (e.g. ClientA(prio=50) and ClientB(prio=60) -> ClientB receives the messages sent to x#xyz.com). But there are also negative priorities. A priority less than 0 states that this client should never be sent any messages. Such a stanza might look like this
<presence from="x#xyz.com/bot">
<priority>-1</priority>
</presence>
This may fit your case. Please keep in mind it also depends on the XMPP server where your account is located, which may or may have not fully implemented this part of the protocol.
So to summarize: I recommend you to look through the Smack API how to set a presence and set the priority to <0 for your bot client right after it connected.