Sails pubsub how to subscribe to a model instance? - sails.js

Question

I am struggling to receive pubsub events in my client. The client store (reflux) gets the data from a project using its id. As I understand it this automatically subscribes the Sails socket for realtime events (from version 0.10), but I don't see it happening.
Here's my client store getting data from sails
(this is ES6 syntax)
onLoadProject(id) {
var url = '/api/projects/' + id;
io.socket.get(url, (p, jwres) => {
console.log('loaded project', id);
this.project = p;
this.trigger(p);
});
io.socket.on("project", function(event){
console.log('realtime event', event);
});
},
Then I created a test "touch" action in my project controller, just to have the modifiedAt field updated.
touch: function(req, res){
var id = req.param('id');
Project.findOne(id)
.then(function(project) {
if (!project) throw new Error('No project with id ' + id);
return Project.update({id: id}, {touched: project.touched+1});
})
.then(function(){
// this should not be required right?
return Project.publishUpdate(id);
})
.done(function() {
sails.log('touched ok');
res.ok();
}, function(e) {
sails.log("touch failed", e.message, e.stack);
res.serverError(e.message);
});
}
This doesn't trigger any realtime event in my client code. I also added a manual Project.publishUpdate(), but this shouldn't be required right?
What am I missing?
-------- edit ----------
There was a complication a result of my model touched attribute, since I set it to 'number' instead of 'integer' and the ORM exception wasn't caught by the promise error handling without a catch() part. So the code above works, hurray! But the realtime events are received for every instance of Project.
So let me rephrase my question:
How can I subscribe the client socket to an instance instead of a model? I could check the id on the client side and retrieve the updated instance data but that seems inefficient since every client receives a notification about every project even though they only should care about a single one.
----- edit again ------
So nevermind. The reason I was getting updates from every instance is simply because at the start of my application I triggered a findAll to get a list of available projects. As a result my socket got subscribed for all of them. The workaround would be to either initiate that call via plain http instead of a socket, or use a separate controller action for retrieving the list (therefor bypassing the blueprint route). I picked the second option because in my case it's silly to fetch all project data prior to picking one.

Answer 1

So to answer my own question. The reason I was getting updates from every instance is simply because at the start of my application I triggered a findAll to get a list of available projects. As a result my socket got subscribed for all of them.
The workaround would be to either initiate that call via plain http instead of a socket, or use a separate controller action for retrieving the list (therefor bypassing the blueprint route). I picked the second option because in my case it's silly to fetch all resources data prior to selecting one.
Here's the function I used to list all resources, where I filter part of the data which is not relevant for browsing the list initially.
list: function(req, res) {
Project.find()
.then(function(projects) {
var keys = [
'id',
'name',
'createdAt',
'updatedAt',
'author',
'description',
];
return projects.map(function(project){
return _.pick(project, keys);
});
})
.catch(function (e){
res.serverError(e.message);
})
.done(function(list){
res.json(list);
}, function(e) {
res.serverError(e.message);
});
},
Note that when the user loads a resource (project in my case) and then switches to another resource, the client is will be subscribed to both resources. I believe it requires a request to an action where you unsubscribe the socket explicitly to prevent this. In my case this isn't such a problem, but I plan to solve that later.
I hope this is helpful to someone.