[Django]-Using django signals in channels consumer classes

If someone stumbles upon on that, this is the way I solved it in the signals.py. I have a Job and need to send its status to the client every time it changes. This is my signals.py:

import channels.layers
from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync

from django.db.models.signals import post_save
from django.dispatch import receiver

from .models import Job


def send_message(event):
    '''
    Call back function to send message to the browser
    '''
    message = event['text']
    channel_layer = channels.layers.get_channel_layer()
    # Send message to WebSocket
    async_to_sync(channel_layer.send)(text_data=json.dumps(
        message
    ))


@receiver(post_save, sender=Job, dispatch_uid='update_job_status_listeners')
def update_job_status_listeners(sender, instance, **kwargs):
    '''
    Sends job status to the browser when a Job is modified
    '''

    user = instance.owner
    group_name = 'job-user-{}'.format(user.username)

    message = {
        'job_id': instance.id,
        'title': instance.title,
        'status': instance.status,
        'modified': instance.modified.isoformat(),
    }

    channel_layer = channels.layers.get_channel_layer()

    async_to_sync(channel_layer.group_send)(
        group_name,
        {
            'type': 'send_message',
            'text': message
        }
    )

By the way, I have a Consumer class JobUserConsumer(AsyncWebsocketConsumer) where I define the groups:

async def connect(self):

    user = self.scope["user"]
    self.group_name = 'job-user-{}'.format(user.username)

    await self.channel_layer.group_add(
        self.group_name,
        self.channel_name
    )

    await self.accept()

The project I used this is here: https://github.com/ornl-ndav/django-remote-submission/tree/master/django_remote_submission

For those who still have problems with web sockets, this could be helpful:

from api.models import Order, OrderOffer
from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync
import channels.layers
from channels.generic.websocket import JsonWebsocketConsumer
from django.db.models import signals
from django.dispatch import receiver


class OrderOfferConsumer(JsonWebsocketConsumer):
    def connect(self):
        async_to_sync(self.channel_layer.group_add)(
            'order_offer_group',
            self.channel_name
        )
        self.accept()

    def disconnect(self, close_code):
        async_to_sync(self.channel_layer.group_discard)(
            'order_offer_group',
            self.channel_name
        )
        self.close()

    def receive_json(self, content, **kwargs):
        print(f"Received event: {content}")

    def events_alarm(self, event):
        self.send_json(event['data'])

    @staticmethod
    @receiver(signals.post_save, sender=OrderOffer)
    def order_offer_observer(sender, instance, **kwargs):
        layer = channels.layers.get_channel_layer()
        async_to_sync(layer.group_send)('order_offer_group', {
            'type': 'events.alarm',
            'data': {
                'text': 'Offer received',
                'id': instance.pk
            }
        })

In urls.py you need to register a new webscoket route:

websocket_urlpatterns = [url(r'^order_offer$', OrderOfferConsumer)]

If you want to talk to the consumer from “outside” – in this case, from a model save method – you’ll need to use a Channel Layer to talk to it: http://channels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/channel_layers.html

Essentially, you’ll need to:

• Add the consumer to a Group on startup (probably based on its order ID)
• Send a message to the Group whenever there’s a new OrderOffer with a custom type – e.g. {"type": "order.new_offer", "order_offer_id": 45}
• Define a handler on the Consumer that handles this – it matches the type name, so in this case it would be def order_new_offer(self, event):
• In that handler you can then use self.send to talk down the socket (and query the database if you need extra info to send to the client you didn’t put into the event message).

You can see a variant of this in the MultiChat example project: https://github.com/andrewgodwin/channels-examples/tree/master/multichat