Django channels live chat save sent messages - django

Question

So I have a Django app in which I used channels to implement live chat. My consumer looks like this:
import json
from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync
from channels.generic.websocket import WebsocketConsumer
class ChatConsumer(WebsocketConsumer):
def connect(self):
self.room_name = self.scope['url_route']['kwargs']['room_name']
self.room_group_name = 'chat_%s' % self.room_name
# Join room group
async_to_sync(self.channel_layer.group_add)(
self.room_group_name,
self.channel_name
)
self.accept()
def disconnect(self, close_code):
# Leave room group
async_to_sync(self.channel_layer.group_discard)(
self.room_group_name,
self.channel_name
)
# Receive message from WebSocket
def receive(self, text_data):
text_data_json = json.loads(text_data)
message = text_data_json['message']
username = self.scope["user"]
# Send message to room group
async_to_sync(self.channel_layer.group_send)(
self.room_group_name,
{
'type': 'chat_message',
'message': message,
'user': username.username
}
)
# Receive message from room group
def chat_message(self, event):
message = event['message']
user=event['user']
print(user)
# Send message to WebSocket
self.send(text_data=json.dumps({
'message': message,
'user':user
}))
So I am looking for a way to save the sent messages (because currently they are lost on refresh). I have created a Messages model that has a CharField for the message text. I think I can save new messages if I do this in my chat_message function:
new_message=Messages(text=message)
new_nessage.save()
My question is how do I preload the last 10 messages whenever a user gets connected to the chat?

Answer 1

So in order to do this, I ended up saving my message to the database in the "receive" function (because if you save it in the chat_message one it's saved 1 time for each active user). Then in order to preload messages I used an AJAX call every time a websocket is opened in order to get the 10 most recent messages using a python function and then I passed the messages back as a JsonResponse (https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/tutorial/2016/08/29/how-to-work-with-ajax-request-with-django.html scroll down to the AJAX requests part of this article and take a look at signup.html, urls.py and views.py files in this order for reference).