Question

I asked this question before which has got a very good response. But as I am new to asp.net (and jquery) cant understand how the program is flowing.

Summary:

I have created a Basic chat application. Now I am trying to add a advanced function like whenever a user is online (connected to a server), the server should show or broadcast the available online user’s username to all the users connected to that server.

By referring the responses to the previous question (s0nica and VinayC), I modified my class file and jquery file, which are giving errors as shown in the below links. (I think I am very close)

Chat.cs (Two errors, I mentioned errors in between code comments)
file.js (Working fine, refer it if you need to)

Please have a look to the above files and assist me.

PS: In the previous post, I was thinking that if I change the Global.asax code, my problem will be solved.. which I realized later as wrong..

Answer 1

Your first error from:

Clients.joins(Context.ConnectionId, Caller.username, DateTime.Now);

Shold be:

Clients.All.joins(Context.ConnectionId, Clients.Caller.username, DateTime.Now);

Other errors associated with it: In your JS file it should be:
Line 15

chat.state.username = chatUsername;

Second error:
The error is exactly as it states, you do not have a toList function off of your dictionary object. Secondly you can’t plainly convert a List or a string directly to a Chat object.

Based on your setup you currently dont have a proper “user” list to return. Right now you’re saving a List to represent an individual user. You might want to try changing your dictionary object to be something like

static ConcurrentDictionary<string, User> _users = new ConcurrentDictionary<string, User>();

Where User is:

public class User
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string ConnectionID { get; set; }
}

Then on your Joined function you could just do:

public void Joined()
{
    User user = new User 
    { 
        Name = Clients.Caller.username,
        ConnectionID = Context.ConnectionId
    };

    _users.TryAdd(user.ConnectionID, user);
    Clients.All.joins(user.ConnectionID, user.Name, DateTime.Now);
}

Lastly your GetConnectedUsers would end up(make sure you’re ‘using System.Linq;’):

public List<User> GetConnectedUsers()
{
    return _users.Values.ToList();
}

I probably went a little bit overboard but hopefully this helps!

If you need a reference to the change log from SignalR 0.5.3 to 1.0 alpha here’s a great post on all of the modifications:
http://weblogs.asp.net/davidfowler/archive/2012/11/11/microsoft-asp-net-signalr.aspx