Elm divide subscription? - elm

Question

I'm playing with Elm and WebRTC, so I made a listen port which gets some messages from js:
type alias Message =
{ channel : String
, data : String
}
port listen : (Message -> msg) -> Sub msg
Now I would like to be able to divide the messages to different parts of my app. For instance, the chat uses the "chat" channel, while the game logic uses "game".
Is it possible to create a listenTo String subscription that filters out the messages with the correct channel (only returning the data)? Or perhaps a different way of doing it?
Update:
What I currently have, is something like this:
In my main.elm I have an update that looks like this. It can receive messages (from rtc) itself, and send messages for chat to it. (I would later add a "ForGame" then too)
type Msg = Received WebRTC.Message | ForChat Chat.Msg
update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg)
update msg model =
case msg of
Received message ->
let
_ = Debug.log ("Received message on \"" ++ message.channel ++ "\": " ++ message.data)
in
( model
, Cmd.none
)
ForChat msg ->
let
(chatModel, chatCmd) = Chat.update msg model.chat
in
({ model | chat = chatModel}, Cmd.map ForChat chatCmd)
Then I have subscriptions that combines all my subscriptions:
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model =
Sub.batch
[ WebRTC.listen Received
, Sub.map ForChat <| Chat.subscriptions model.chat
]
In Chat.elm I have a similar structure, with an update that handles it's messages. The subscription of the chat listens to all messages from WebRTC, but filters only the ones with channel chat:
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model = WebRTC.listen forChatMessages
forChatMessages : WebRTC.Message -> Msg
forChatMessages webrtcMessage =
if webrtcMessage.channel == "chat"
then
let
message = decodeMessage webrtcMessage.data
in
case message of
Ok msg -> Receive msg
Err error -> Debug.log ("Received unreadable message on chat channel \"" ++ toString webrtcMessage.data ++ "\" with error \"" ++ error ++ "\"") Ignore
else
Ignore
(Ignore is a Msg for chat, which just does nothing case msg of Ignore -> (model, Cmd.none). decodeMessage uses a decoder to decode a message decodeMessage : String -> Result String Message.)
I'm quite happy with this, because this way all logic for chat is in Chat.elm. So main.elm doesn't need to know what channels chat is using. Chat just follows the standard structure (Msg, update, view, subscriptions) and main forwards everything.
The only thing that's still not great, is that in Chat.elm I have the forChatMessages function. Used like: subscriptions model = WebRTC.listen forChatMessages. I would like to make this more reuseable, so it would become something like:
subscriptions model = WebRTC.listen for "chat" decodeMessage Receive Ignore
It would then be reusable by the game:
subscriptions model = WebRTC.listen for "game" decodeGameInfo UpdateInfo Ignore
Update 2:
I managed to generalize the forChatMessages function into:
for : String -> (String -> Result String d) -> (d -> msg) -> msg -> Message -> msg
for channel decoder good bad webrtcMessage =
if
webrtcMessage.channel == channel
then
let
decoded = decoder webrtcMessage.data
in
case decoded of
Ok data -> good data
Err error -> Debug.log ("Failed decoding message on " ++ channel ++ "channel \"" ++ toString webrtcMessage.data ++ "\" with error \"" ++ error ++ "\"") bad
else
bad
So I think I found the solution myself. Unless someones has comments on this. Perhaps there is a cleaner/nicer/better way of doing the same?

Answer 1

Let's say you have the following Msg definition:
type Msg
= Listen Message
| GameChannel String
| ChatChannel String
Your update function could then act upon the channel value and call update again with the correct channel, ignoring all channel values except for "game" and "chat":
update : Msg -> Model -> ( Model, Cmd Msg )
update msg model =
case msg of
Listen message ->
case message.channel of
"game" ->
update (GameChannel message.data) model
"chat" ->
update (ChatChannel message.data) model
_ ->
model ! []
GameChannel data ->
...
ChatChannel data ->
...
Your subscription function would look something like this:
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model =
listen Listen

Answer 2

I found a solution myself, and added it to the original question.
For clarity, this is the short version:
In my main.elm:
type Msg = Received WebRTC.Message | ForChat Chat.Msg
update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg)
update msg model =
case msg of
Received message ->
let
_ = Debug.log ("Received message on \"" ++ message.channel ++ "\": " ++ message.data)
in
( model
, Cmd.none
)
ForChat msg ->
let
(chatModel, chatCmd) = Chat.update msg model.chat
in
({ model | chat = chatModel}, Cmd.map ForChat chatCmd)
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model =
Sub.batch
[ WebRTC.listen Received
, Sub.map ForChat <| Chat.subscriptions model.chat
]
In Chat.elm:
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model = WebRTC.listen <| for "game" decodeGameInfo UpdateInfo Ignore
In WebRTC.elm:
type alias Message =
{ channel : String
, data : String
}
port listen : (Message -> msg) -> Sub msg
for : String -> (String -> Result String d) -> (d -> msg) -> msg -> Message -> msg
for channel decoder good bad webrtcMessage =
if
webrtcMessage.channel == channel
then
let
decoded = decoder webrtcMessage.data
in
case decoded of
Ok data -> good data
Err error -> Debug.log ("Failed decoding message on " ++ channel ++ "channel \"" ++ toString webrtcMessage.data ++ "\" with error \"" ++ error ++ "\"") bad
else
bad