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Asked: 2026-05-11T14:13:44+00:00

We have implemented a simple chat room feature in Rails using Simple Ajax updates.

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We have implemented a simple chat room feature in Rails using Simple Ajax updates. Now in every chat room a message belongs to particular user. We want to show the list of users(something like user presence). Please suggest ways. We are not using Jabber,XMPP etc.

The Chatroom model is:

class ChatRoom < ActiveRecord::Base   validates_presence_of :title    has_many :messages,:foreign_key=> 'chat_room_id'   has_many :stories,:foreign_key=>'chat_room_id'   has_many :topics,:foreign_key=>'chat_room_id'   end

The messages are the chats sent of every user.

The message model is:

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :user end

The USer model is:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   acts_as_authentic :crypto_provider => Authlogic::CryptoProviders::BCrypt   validates_presence_of :nick   validates_uniqueness_of :nick   has_many :questions   end

Please suggest ways

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1 Answer

  1. To keep track of which users are in which room, you could set up a HABTM relationship between the ChatRoom and User models. And, you could add a last_poll_datetime column to the User model to track the last time the user polled for messages (more on this part in a minute).

    To show a list of all the users in a given room, use your HABTM join table, ChatRooms_Users. You’ll be inserting/deleting from this table whenever a user joins or leaves a room.

    If you want to expire users who close their browsers instead of clicking ‘leave room’, set up a sweeper task to run every minute that looks for users with last_poll_datetime older than one minute and remove their rows from the ChatRooms_Users join table.

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