BigBlueButton How save chat messages to external server

Question

I want to save all chat messages in BigBlueButton to database on external server.

I saw that BigBlueButton don't have API for it.

Could I get messages using some method on external server or I must change BBB methods?

Thank you

Answer 1

BBB do not have API to fetch the chat data, however we can parse and pass the chat message to other server/API.

BBB stores chat data in events.xml file something like this

<event timestamp="1321843915276" module="CHAT" eventname="PublicChatEvent">
    <locale>en</locale>
    <message>&amp;#60;/message&amp;#62;</message>
    <color>0</color>
    <sender>c</sender>
  </event>

you can write small script to read events.xml after meeting completion and push chat data for respective meeting to your dB or exposed service using curl.

hope this helps.

Answer 2

Late answer but this is how you to do it. There are multiple ways to this.

Depending on which version you are using. I am going to assume you are using the latest 0.9 one.

On you external server, you have an application listen to the redis messages sent by the BBB server, and store them to the database. You would need, of course, to listen to the correct channel. Look up redis, to see how you can achieve that.

An other way would be to go to the following service ChatService.java, and search for the following function sendPublicMessage. Inside of it, all the variables and data would have already been extracted. So you can connect to your database from there and add the entry.

There are others ways to this. I personally recommend that you hook your external server to listen to redis, cause it seems to be the simplest and least invasive way to the functionality of BigBlueButton.