server sent event to multiple clients from Flask - python

I am playing around with a small project to get a better understanding of web technologies.
One requirement is that if multiple clients have access to my site, and one make a change all the others should be notified. From what I have gathered Server Sent events seems to do what I want.
However when I open my site in both Firefox and Chrome and try to send an event, only one of the browsers gets it. If I send an event again only one of the browsers gets the new event, usually the browser that did not get event number one.
Here is the relevant code snippets.
Client:
console.log("setting sse handlers")
viewEventSource = new EventSource("{{ url_for('viewEventRequest') }}");
viewEventSource.onmessage = handleViewEvent;
function handleViewEvent(event){
console.log("called handle view event")
console.log(event);
}
Server:
#app.route('/3-3-3/view-event')
def view_event_request():
return Response(handle_view_event(), mimetype='text/event-stream')
def handle_view_event():
while True:
for message in pubsub_view.listen():
if message['type'] == 'message':
data = 'retry: 1\n'
data += 'data: ' + message['data'] + '\n\n'
return data
#app.route('/3-3-3/test')
def test():
red.publish('view-event', "This is a test message")
return make_response("success", 200)
My question is, how do I get the event send to all connected clients and not just one?

Here are some gists that may help (I've been meaning to release something like 'flask-sse' based on 'django-sse):
https://gist.github.com/3680055
https://gist.github.com/3687523
also useful - https://github.com/jkbr/chat/blob/master/app.py
The first thing I notice about your code is that 'handle_view_event' is not a generator.
Though it is in a 'while' loop, the use of 'return' will always exit the function the first time we return data; a function can only return once. I think you want it to be 'yield' instead.
In any case, the above links should give you an example of a working setup.
As Anarov says, websockets and socket.io are also an option, but SSE should work anyway. I think socket.io supports using SSE if ws are not needed.

Related

PyQt readyRead: set text from serial to multiple labels

In PyQt5, I want to read my serial port after writing (requesting a value) to it. I've got it working using readyRead.connect(self.readingReady), but then I'm limited to outputting to only one text field.
The code for requesting parameters sends a string to the serial port. After that, I'm reading the serial port using the readingReady function and printing the result to a plainTextEdit form.
def read_configuration(self):
if self.serial.isOpen():
self.serial.write(f"?request1\n".encode())
self.label_massGainOutput.setText(f"{self.serial.readAll().data().decode()}"[:-2])
self.serial.write(f"?request2\n".encode())
self.serial.readyRead.connect(self.readingReady)
self.serial.write(f"?request3\n".encode())
self.serial.readyRead.connect(self.readingReady)
def readingReady(self):
data = self.serial.readAll()
if len(data) > 0:
self.plainTextEdit_commandOutput.appendPlainText(f"{data.data().decode()}"[:-2])
else: self.serial.flush()
The problem I have, is that I want every answer from the serial port to go to a different plainTextEdit form. The only solution I see now is to write a separate readingReady function for every request (and I have a lot! Only three are shown now). This must be possible in a better way. Maybe using arguments in the readingReady function? Or returning a value from the function that I can redirect to the correct form?
Without using the readyRead signal, all my values are one behind. So the first request prints nothing, the second prints the first etc. and the last is not printed out.
Does someone have a better way to implement this functionality?
QSerialPort has asyncronous (readyRead) and syncronous API (waitForReadyRead), if you only read configuration once on start and ui freezing during this process is not critical to you, you can use syncronous API.
serial.write(f"?request1\n".encode())
serial.waitForReadyRead()
res = serial.read(10)
serial.write(f"?request2\n".encode())
serial.waitForReadyRead()
res = serial.read(10)
This simplification assumes that responces comes in one chunk and message size is below or equal 10 bytes which is not guaranteed. Actual code should be something like this:
def isCompleteMessage(res):
# your code here
serial.write(f"?request2\n".encode())
res = b''
while not isCompleteMessage(res):
serial.waitForReadyRead()
res += serial.read(10)
Alternatively you can create worker or thread, open port and query requests in it syncronously and deliver responces to application using signals - no freezes, clear code, slightly more complicated system.

Python Flask: How to wait for webhook to be executed?

I am working on a Python flask app, and the main method start() calls an external API (third_party_api_wrapper()). That external API has an associated webhook (webhook()) that receives the output of that external API call (note that the output that webhook() receives is actually different from the response returned in the third_party_wrapper())
The main method start() needs the result of webhook(). How do I make start() wait for webhook() to be executed? And how do wo pass the returned value of webhook() back to start()?
Here's is a minimal code snippet to capture the scenario.
#app.route('/webhook', methods=['POST'])
def webhook():
return "webhook method has executed"
# this method has a webhook that calls webhook() after this method has executed
def third_party_api_wrapper():
url = 'https://api.thirdparty.com'
response = requests.post(url)
return response
# this is the main entry point
#app.route('/start', methods=['POST'])
def start():
third_party_api_wrapper()
# The rest of this code depends on the output of webhook().
# How do we wait until webhook() is called, and how do we access the returned value?
The answer to this question really depends on how you plan on running your app in production. It's much simpler if we make the assumption that you only plan to have a single instance of your app running at once (as opposed to multiple behind a load balancer, for example), so I'll make that assumption first to give you a place to start, and comment on a more "production-ready" solution afterwards.
A big thing to keep in mind when writing a web application is that you have to understand how you want the outside world to interact with your app. Do you expect to have the /start endpoint called only once at the beginning of your app's lifetime, or is this a generic endpoint that may start any number of background processes that you want the caller of each to wait for? Or, do you want the behavior where any caller after the first one will wait for the same process to complete as the first one? I can't answer these questions for you, it depends on the use-case you're trying to implement. I'll give you a relatively simple solution that you should be able to modify to fulfill any of the ones I mentioned though.
This solution will use the Event class from the threading standard library module; I added some comments to clarify which parts you may have to change depending on the specifics of the API you're calling and stuff like that.
import threading
import uuid
from typing import Any
import requests
from flask import Flask, Response, request
# The base URL for your app, if you're running it locally this should be fine
# however external providers can't communicate with your `localhost` so you'll
# need to change this for your app to work end-to-end.
BASE_URL = "http://localhost:5000"
app = Flask(__name__)
class ThirdPartyProcessManager:
def __init__(self) -> None:
self.events = {}
self.values = {}
def wait_for_request(self, request_id: str) -> None:
event = threading.Event()
actual_event = self.events.setdefault(request_id, event)
if actual_event is not event:
raise ValueError(f"Request {request_id} already exists.")
event.wait()
return self.values.pop(request_id)
def finish_request(self, request_id: str, value: Any) -> None:
event = self.events.pop(request_id, None)
if event is None:
raise ValueError(f"Request {request_id} does not exist.")
self.values[request_id] = value
event.set()
MANAGER = ThirdPartyProcessManager()
# This is assuming that you can specify the callback URL per-request, otherwise
# you may have to get the request ID from the body of the request or something
#app.route('/webhook/<request_id>', methods=['POST'])
def webhook(request_id: str) -> Response:
MANAGER.finish_request(request_id, request.json)
return "webhook method has executed"
# Somehow in here you need to create or generate a unique identifier for this
# request--this may come from the third-party provider, or you can generate one
# yourself. There are three main paths I see here:
# - If you can specify the callback/webhook URL in each call, you can just pass them
# <base>/webhook/<request_id> and use that to identify which request is being
# responded to in the webhook.
# - If the provider gives you a request ID, you can return it from this function
# then retrieve it from the request body in the webhook route
# For now, I'll assume the first situation but you should be able to implement the second
# with minimal changes
def third_party_api_wrapper() -> str:
request_id = uuid.uuid4().hex
url = 'https://api.thirdparty.com'
# Just an example, I don't know how the third party API you're working with works
response = requests.post(
url,
json={"callback_url": f"{BASE_URL}/webhook/{request_id}"}
)
# NOTE: unrelated to the problem at hand, you should always check for errors
# in HTTP responses. This method is an easy way provided by requests to raise
# for non-success status codes.
response.raise_for_status()
return request_id
#app.route('/start', methods=['POST'])
def start() -> Response:
request_id = third_party_api_wrapper()
result = MANAGER.wait_for_request(request_id)
return result
If you want to run the example fully locally to test it, do the following:
Comment out lines 62-71, which actually make the external API call
Add a print statement after line 77, so that you can get the ID of the "in flight" request. E.g. print("Request ID", request_id)
In one terminal, run the app by pasting the above code into an app.py file and running flask run in that directory.
In another terminal, start the process via:
curl -XPOST http://localhost:5000/start
Copy the request ID that will be logged in the first terminal that's running the server.
In a third terminal, complete the process by calling the webhook:
curl -XPOST http://localhost:5000/webhook/<your_request_id> -H Content-Type:application/json -d '{"foo":"bar"}'
You should see {"foo":"bar"} as the response in the second terminal that made the /start request.
I hope that's enough to help you get started w/ whatever problem you're trying to solve.
There are a couple of design-y comments I have based on the information provided as well:
As I mentioned before, this will not work if you have more than one instance of the app running at once. This works by storing the state of in-flight requests in a global state inside your python process, so if you have more than one process, they won't all be working and modifying the same state. If you need to run more than one instance of your process, I would use a similar approach with some database backend to store the shared state (assuming your requests are pretty short-lived, Redis might be a good choice here, but once again it'll depend on exactly what you're trying to do).
Even if you do only have one instance of the app running, flask is capable of being run in a variety of different server contexts--for example, the server might be using threads (the default), greenlets via gevent or a similar library, or multiple processes, or maybe some other approach entirely in order to handle multiple requests concurrently. If you're using an approach that creates multiple processes, you should be able to use the utilities provided by the multiprocessing module to implement the same approach as I've given above.
This approach probably will work just fine for something where the difference in time between the API call and the webhook response is small (on the order of a couple of seconds at most I'd say), but you should be wary of using this approach for something where the difference in time can be quite large. If the connection between the client and your server fails, they'll have to make another request and run the long-running process that your third party is completing for you again. Some proxies and load balancers may also have time out behavior that could terminate the request after a certain amount of time even if nothing goes wrong in the connection between your server and the client making a request to it. An alternative approach would be for your /start endpoint to return quickly and give the client a request_id that they could poll for updates. As an example, AWS Athena's API is structured like this--there is a StartQueryExecution method, and separate GetQueryExecution and GetQueryResults methods that the client makes requests to check the status of a query and retrieve the results respectively (there are also other methods like StopQueryExecution and GetQueryRuntimeStatistics available as well). You can check out the documentation here.
I know that's a lot of info, but I hope it helps. Happy to update the answer w/ more specific info if you'll provide some more details about your use-case.

Socket issues in Python

I'm building a simple server-client app using sockets. Right now, I am trying to get my client to print to console only when it received a specific message (actually, when it doesn't receive a specific message), but for some reason, every other time I run it, it goes through the other statement in my code and is really inconsistent - sometimes it will work as it should and then it will randomly break for a couple uses.
Here is the code on my client side:
def post_checker(client_socket):
response = client_socket.recv(1024)
#check if response is "NP" for a new post from another user
if response == "NP":
new_response = client_socket.recv(1024)
print new_response
else: #print original message being sent
print response
where post_checker is called in the main function as simply "post_checker(client_socket)" Basically, sometimes I get "NPray" printed to my console (when the client only expects to receive the username "ray") and other times it will print correctly.
Here is the server code correlated to this
for sublist in user_list:
client_socket.send("NP")
client_socket.send(sublist[1] + " ")
where user_list is a nested list and sublist[1] is the username I wish to print out on the client side.
Whats going on here?
The nature of your problem is that TCP is a streaming protocol. The bufsize in recv(bufsize) is a maximum size. The recv function will always return data when available, even if not all of the bytes have been received.
See the documentation for details.
This causes problems when you've only sent half the bytes, but you've already started processing the data. I suggest you take a look at the "recvall" concept from this site or you can also consider using UDP sockets (which would solve this problem but may create a host of others as UDP is not a guaranteed protocol).
You may also want to let the python packages handle some of the underlying framework for you. Consider using a SocketServer as documented here:
buffer = []
def recv(sock):
global buffer
message = b""
while True:
if not (b"\r\n" in b"".join(buffer)):
chunk = sock.recv(1024)
if not chunk:
break
buffer.append(chunk)
concat = b"".join(buffer)
if (b"\r\n" in concat):
message = concat[:concat.index(b"\r\n")]
concat = concat[concat.index(b"\r\n") + 2:]
buffer = [concat]
break
return message
def send(sock, data):
sock.send(data + b"\r\n")
I have tested this, and in my opinion, it works perfectly
My use case: I have two scripts that send data quickly, it ends up that one time or another, the buffers receive more than they should, and gather the data, with this script it leaves everything that receives more saved, and continues receiving until there is a new line between the data, and then, it gathers the data, divides in the new line, saves the rest and returns the data perfectly separated
(I translated this, so please excuse me if anything is wrong or misunderstood)

Python Thread not returning the value

Using: Django with Python
Overall objective: Call a function which processes video conversion (internally makes a curl command to the media server) and should immediately return back to the user.
Using message queue would be an overkill for the app.
So I had decided to use threads, I have written a class which overwrites the init and run method and calls the curl command
class process_video(Thread):
def __init__ (self,video_id,video_title,fileURI):
Thread.__init__(self)
self.video_id = video_id
self.video_title = video_title
self.fileURI = fileURI
self.status =-1
def run(self):
logging.debug("FileURi" + self.fileURI)
curlCmd = "curl --data-urlencode \"fileURI=%s\" %s/finalize"% (self.fileURI, settings.MEDIA_ROOT)
logging.debug("Command to be executed" + str(curlCmd))
#p = subprocess.call(str(curlCmd), shell=True)
output_media_server,error = subprocess.Popen(curlCmd,stdout = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()
logging.debug("value returned from media server:")
logging.debug(output_media_server)
And I instantiate this class from another function called createVideo
which calls like this success = process_video(video_id, video_title, fileURI)
Problem:
The user gets redirected back to the other view from the createVideo and the processVideo gets called, however for some reason the created thread (process_video) doesn't wait for the output from the media server.
I wouldn't rely on threads being executed correctly within web applications. Depending on the web server's MPM, the process that executes the request might get killed after a request is done (I guess).
I'd recommend to make the media server request synchronously but let the media server return immediately after it started the encoding without problems (if you have control over its source code). Then a background process (or cron) could poll for the result regularly. This is only one solution - you should provide more information about your infrastructure (e.g. do you control the media server?).
Also check the duplicates in another question's comments for some answers about using task queues in such a scenario.
BTW I assume that no exception occurs in the background thread?!
Here is the thing what I did for getting around the issue which I was facing.
I used django piston to create an API for calling the processvideo with the parameters passed as GET, I was getting a 403 CSRF error when I was trying to send the parameters as POST.
and from the createVideo function I was calling the API like this
cmd = "curl \"%s/api/process_video/?video_id=%s&fileURI=%s&video_title=%s\" > /dev/null 2>&1 &" %(settings.SITE_URL, str(video_id),urllib.quote(fileURI),urllib.quote(video_title))
and this worked.
I feel it would have been helpful if I could have got the session_id and post parameters to work. Not sure how I could get off that csrf thing to work.

Jabber bot - how to get the availability of contacts?

I need to set up a jabber bot, using python, that will send messages based on the online/offline availability of several contacts.
I've been looking into pyxmpp and xmpppy, but couldn't find any way (at least nothing straightforward) to check the status of a given contact.
Any pointers on how to achieve this?
Ideally I would like something like e.g. bot.status_of("contact1#gmail.com") returning "online"
I don't think it is possible in the way you want it because the presence of contacts (which contains the information about their availability) is received asynchronously by the bot.
You will have to write a presence handler function and registered it with the connection. This function will get called whenever a presence is received from a contact. The parameter of the call will tell you if the contact is online or not. Depending upon it you can send the message to the contact.
Using xmpppy you do it something like this:
def connect(jid, password, res, server, proxy, use_srv):
conn = xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain())
if not conn.connect(server=server, proxy=proxy, use_srv=use_srv):
log( 'unable to connect to server.')
return None
if not conn.auth(jid.getNode(), password, res):
log( 'unable to authorize with server.')
return None
conn.RegisterHandler( 'presence', callback_presence)
return conn
conn = connect(...)
def callback_presence(sess, pres):
if pres.getStatus() == "online":
msg = xmpp.Message(pres.getFrom(), "Hi!")
conn.send(msg)
PS: I have not tested the code but it should be something very similar to this.
What you want is done via a <presence type="probe"/>. This is done on behalf of the client, and SHOULD not be done by them (as per the RFC for XMPP IM). Since this is a bot, you could implement the presence probe, and receive the current presence of a given entity. Remember to send the probe to the bare JID (sans resource), because the server responds on behalf of clients for presence probes. This means your workflow will look like:
<presence/> // I'm online! BOT
<presence from="juliet#capulet.org/balcony"/> RESPONSE
<presence from="romeo#montague.net/hallway"/> // and so on... RESPONSE
<presence type="probe" to="benvolio#montague.net"/> BOT
<presence from="benvoio#montague.net/hallway"> RESPONSE
<status>Huzzah!</status>
<priority>3</priority>
</presence>
Take a look at that portion of the RFC for more in depth information on how your call flow should behave.
What you need to do is:
Connect.
Declare a presence handler. That handler maintains a cache of every contact's presence (see details below)
Send initial presence to the server, which will provoke the reception of presence statuses from all of your online contacts, which will in turn trigger the handler.
The status_of() method reads the cache and deduces the contact's presence status immediately.
Now, it depends on what presence information you need. For the sake of simplicity, let's pretend you just need an "online"/"offline" value. The cache would be a dictionary whose keys are the bare (no resource) JIDs, and the values are a set of connected resources for this JID. For example:
{'foo#bar.com': set(['work', 'notebook']), 'bob#example.net': set(['gtalk'])}
Now, when you receive an "available" presence from a certain JID/resource:
if jid not in cache:
cache[jid] = set()
cache[jid].add(resource)
Reciprocally, when you receive an "unavailable" presence:
if jid in cache: # bad people send "unavailable" just to make your app crash
cache[jid].discard(resource)
if 0 == len(cache[jid]):
del cache[jid]
And now:
def is_online(jid):
return jid in cache
Of course, if you want more detailed information, you could maintain not only the list of available resources for a contact but also the status, status message, priority, etc. of each resource.

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