How synchronise socketIO connection ID's on client and server?

问题

I have a javascript GameClient that uses SocketIO to send messages to a nodeJs server. Multiple users can open the GameClient separately and send messages to the server.

GameClient
GameClient  ---> NodeJS Server
GameClient

The server can send messages to specific clients using io.to(socketid).emit(). The code looks something like this:

CLIENT

this.socket = io({ timeout: 60000 })
this.socket.on('connect', () => Settings.getInstance().socketid = this.socket.id)
this.socket.on('reconnect', (attemptNumber:number) => console.log("reconnecting..."))

const json = JSON.Stringify({socketid:this.socket.id, name:"Old Billy Bob"})
this.socket.emit('user created', json)

SERVER (simplified for clarity, just keeping track of one user here)

user = {}

io.on('connection', (socket) => {
    console.log('new connection')
    socket.on('disconnect', () => {
        console.log('user disconnected')
    });

    socket.on('user created', (json) => {
        user = JSON.parse(json)
    });
});

// demo code, send a message to our user
io.to(user.socketid).emit("message to one user")

PROBLEM

When the client browser tab becomes inactive for any reason at all, the client disconnects and reconnects and gets a new socket connection ID. This actually happens a lot in Chrome and Safari.

The server only knows the old connection id, so now it can't send direct messages any more. How do I keep the socket connection id synchronised on the client and server?

Since the server also gets a reconnected event, how does it know which user reconnected?

回答1:

The answer to your question is quite simple: you need a way to identify who is who. And that is not socket.id because this only identifies sockets, not users, as you've already noticed.

So you need some authentication mechanism. Once a user authenticates you can reuse his true id (whether it is simply a name or an integer in a database is irrelevant). And then on the server side you keep a collection of pairs (true_id, socket_id). And whenever a message comes to that user, you broadcast it to all matched socket.io objects.

Edit: So here's the flow:

Client authenticates with the server, the server sends him his own true_id, which the client stores somewhere. The client may also store some session_id or maybe some other mechanism that will allow him fast reauthentication in case of disconnection (note: do not store credentials, its a security issue).
The server keeps track of (true_id, socket_id) pairs in the form of a double way, mutlivalue map (it's an implementation detail what kind of data structure should be used here, maybe two {} objects is enough). If a connection dies then (true_id, socket_id) entry is removed. Note that for a given true_id there still may be some other socket_id alive. And so it doesn't mean that the user disconnected. It only means that this particular channel is dead.
Users don't care about socket_id, they only care about true_id. What you emit is {target_id: true_id, ...} instead of {target_id: socket_id, ...} on the client side, when you want to send a direct message.
When the server receives such message with true_id inside, it retrieves all (true_id, socket_id) pairs and passes the message to all of these sockets (note: maybe you don't even need socket_id, you can simply store socket objects here). Although this is a business logic: do you allow multiple connections per user? I would. There are many edge cases here (like for example a client thinks that he disconnected, but the server thinks he is still connected, etc) and making this 100% correct is unfortunately impossible (due to the nature of networking). But with a bit of effort it is possible to make it work 99% of the time.
If a connection dies then it is your client's responsibility to automatically reconnect and reauthenticate. New socket_id for old true_id is generated on the server side.

Let me emphasize this again: clients don't care about socket_id at all. Because that doesn't identify them. This only identifies a channel. And only the server cares about this information.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58208626/how-synchronise-socketio-connection-ids-on-client-and-server

标签

javascript

node.js

websocket

Socket.IO