Does Django Channels support a synchronous long-polling consumer? - django

Question

I'm using Channels v2.
I want to integrate long-polling into my project.
The only consumer I see in the documentation for http long polling is the AsyncHttpConsumer.
The code I need to run in my handle function is not asynchronous. It connects to another device on the network using a library that is not asynchronous. From what I understand, this will cause the event loop to block, which is bad.
Can I run my handler synchronously, in a thread somehow? There's a SyncConsumer, but that seems to have something to do with Web Sockets. It doesn't seem applicable to Long Polling.

Answer 1

Using AsyncHttpConsumer as a reference, I was able to write an almost exact duplicate of the class, but subclassing SyncConsumer instead of AsyncConsumer as AsyncHttpConsumer does.
After a bit of testing, I soon realized that since my code was all running in a single thread, until the handle() method finished running, which presumably runs until done, the disconnect() method wouldn't be triggered, so there was no way to interrupt a long running handle() method, even if the client disconnects.
The following new version runs handle() in a thread, and gives the user 2 ways to check if the client disconnected:
from channels.consumer import SyncConsumer
from channels.exceptions import StopConsumer
from threading import Thread, Event
# We can't pass self.client_disconnected to handle() as a reference if it's
# a regular bool. That means if we use a regular bool, and the variable
# changes in this thread, it won't change in the handle() method. Using a
# class fixes this.
# Technically, we could just pass the Event() object
# (self.client_disconnected) to the handle() method, but then the client
# needs to know to use .is_set() instead of just checking if it's True or
# False. This is easier for the client.
class RefBool:
def __init__(self):
self.val = Event()
def set(self):
self.val.set()
def __bool__(self):
return self.val.is_set()
def __repr__(self):
current_value = bool(self)
return f"RefBool({current_value})"
class SyncHttpConsumer(SyncConsumer):
"""
Sync HTTP consumer. Provides basic primitives for building synchronous
HTTP endpoints.
"""
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.handle_thread = None
self.client_disconnected = RefBool()
self.body = []
def send_headers(self, *, status=200, headers=None):
"""
Sets the HTTP response status and headers. Headers may be provided as
a list of tuples or as a dictionary.
Note that the ASGI spec requires that the protocol server only starts
sending the response to the client after ``self.send_body`` has been
called the first time.
"""
if headers is None:
headers = []
elif isinstance(headers, dict):
headers = list(headers.items())
self.send(
{"type": "http.response.start", "status": status, "headers": headers}
)
def send_body(self, body, *, more_body=False):
"""
Sends a response body to the client. The method expects a bytestring.
Set ``more_body=True`` if you want to send more body content later.
The default behavior closes the response, and further messages on
the channel will be ignored.
"""
assert isinstance(body, bytes), "Body is not bytes"
self.send(
{"type": "http.response.body", "body": body, "more_body": more_body}
)
def send_response(self, status, body, **kwargs):
"""
Sends a response to the client. This is a thin wrapper over
``self.send_headers`` and ``self.send_body``, and everything said
above applies here as well. This method may only be called once.
"""
self.send_headers(status=status, **kwargs)
self.send_body(body)
def handle(self, body):
"""
Receives the request body as a bytestring. Response may be composed
using the ``self.send*`` methods; the return value of this method is
thrown away.
"""
raise NotImplementedError(
"Subclasses of SyncHttpConsumer must provide a handle() method."
)
def disconnect(self):
"""
Overrideable place to run disconnect handling. Do not send anything
from here.
"""
pass
def http_request(self, message):
"""
Sync entrypoint - concatenates body fragments and hands off control
to ``self.handle`` when the body has been completely received.
"""
if "body" in message:
self.body.append(message["body"])
if not message.get("more_body"):
full_body = b"".join(self.body)
self.handle_thread = Thread(target=self.handle, args=(full_body, self.client_disconnected), daemon=True)
self.handle_thread.start()
def http_disconnect(self, message):
"""
Let the user do their cleanup and close the consumer.
"""
self.client_disconnected.set()
self.disconnect()
self.handle_thread.join()
raise StopConsumer()
The SyncHttpConsumer class is used very similarly to how you would use the AsyncHttpConsumer class - you subclass it, and define a handle() method. The only difference is that the handle() method takes an extra arg:
class MyClass(SyncHttpConsumer):
def handle(self, body, client_disconnected):
while not client_disconnected:
...
Or you could, just like with the AsyncHttpConsumer class, override the disconnect() method instead if you prefer.
I'm still not sure if this is the best way to do this, or why Django Channels doesn't include something like this in addition to AsyncHttpConsumer. If anyone knows, please let us know.