Your Conversations applications can display a chat user's online or offline status to other users of the application. This feature is called the Reachability Indicator, and the Conversations service automatically manages the online or offline state for each user if it is activated.
This feature also provides the User's reachability by Push Notification within the Conversations Service instance.
The reachability state is automatically updated and synchronized by the Conversations service, provided the feature is enabled. The feature is enabled on a "per Service instance" basis.
Note: It is important to note that Users exist within the scope of a Conversations Service instance. Thus, the Reachability indicators are also within the same scope.
Each Service instance can have Reachability enabled or disabled. The default is disabled. The reachability state will not be updated if the feature is disabled for a given Service instance. Once enabled, the state will update and synchronize.
You must set the ReachabilityEnabled property using the Service Configuration REST resource to configure the Reachability Indicator feature.
If you choose to enable Reachability Indicators and later wish to return to disabled, set the ReachabilityEnabled property back to false.
The Reachability indicators are exposed for Users in two places:
The following read-only properties within the Users REST resource provide Reachability information for Users:
is_online
is_notifiable
These properties are set by the Conversations system if the Reachability Indicator feature is enabled for a User's Service instance.
Note: These properties can be null under the following conditions:
LIST GET
resource representations only have a
true
or
false
value for specific
GET
requests
Please see the REST Users resource documentation for more information.
Within the Conversations Client SDKs, the Reachability Indicator properties are exposed in the User objects.
Real-time updates to other Users' Reachability Indicator states are communicated via the update event mechanism for subscribed User objects. Please see the specific SDK API documentation for details, as each SDK/platform handles this update a little differently.
An indicator of your Service instance's Reachability status (reachability_enabled ) is also exposed at the SDK client level.
The read only client SDK properties exposed are:
ConversationsClient.reachabilityEnabled
User.isOnline
User.isNotifiable
Note: The above are representations. The specifics of how these properties are accessed are distinct for each language/SDK.
Note: These user properties are read only and cannot be set. Conversations will update these settings and synchronize them as necessary. The Service Configuration REST resource manages the Service-level Reachability feature from the back-end code.
Handle an UpdateReason change and process the Reachability Indicators
_18// function called after client init to set up event handlers_18function registerEventHandlers() {_18 user = conversationsClient.user;_18 // Register User updated event handler_18 user.on('updated', function(event) {_18 handleUserUpdate(event.user, event.updateReasons)_18 });_18}_18_18// function to handle User updates_18function handleUserUpdate(user, updateReasons) {_18 // loop over each reason and check for reachability change_18 updateReasons.forEach(function(reason) {_18 if (reason == 'online') {_18 //do something_18 }_18 });_18}