Converse Over a Channel
Explore how to establish persistent bidirectional communication using Phoenix Channels in Elixir. Learn to handle messages with reply tuples, push events, and broadcasting to multiple clients. This lesson helps you understand the flow of messages between client and server, enabling you to build responsive real-time features within your web applications.
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Bidirectional communications
This is where things start to get interesting. So far, we’ve sent a join message and gotten an ok back. However, Channels support much richer forms of bidirectional communications between clients and the server. We now take a closer look at the most common bidirectional communications. These will help us while building our own applications.
The simplest way to send a message back from the server is to return a :reply tuple from the Channel callback. This is a three-element tuple {:reply, some_response, socket}, where the middle element gets sent back to the client who originally sent the message. This should look really familiar after our work with GenServer.
Another way to talk back from a Channel is with the push/3 function. ...