Socket IO - How to have Multiple Admin Users to Multiple Private Rooms on Multiple URLs

Question

I have searched long and far. I am typically familiar with the LAMP stack so apologies - I am learning Node as I'm trying to build a chat feature - similar to how Intercom/drift would work.

I have been led to believe that Socket.io is a good way to go about this, and I am having a little bit of trouble. The basic overview is something like this:

• Users can use my service to have a live chat feature enabled on their websites (they each have a unique API key)
• They can add the chat to any number of web pages/domains (via a script tag)
• The chat should be private between any single end user of the website, and the admin of the script tag (owner of the API key used to include the script on the page)

---

I'm having trouble with this.

Should I create dynamic namespaces for each URL, or is it a room?

Lets say I create a dynamic room on the client side that is unique such as is used in https://stackoverflow.com/a/19150254/1173155

// client side code
var dynamicRoomName = API_KEY + "_" + fullURL  + "_" + expressSessionId;
var socket = io.connect();
socket.emit('create room', dynamicRoomName);

// server side code
io.sockets.on('connection', function(socket) {
  socket.on('create room', function(room) {
    socket.join(room);
  });
});

The only person who should be able to see this chat other than the end user is the admin of that API Key, which I'm not sure how to implement.

I realise I will likely need a DB of some sort to keep track of the chats/rooms ect. Is there any good resource on how to learn how to implement this kind of thing?

Help is much appreciated!

---

Just going to expand a small bit on this, perhaps for my own good while working on the problem.

• There can be many admins (unique APIs)
• Admins are responsible for only their own chats - they cannot see any chats that do not belong to their API key
• Many users can chat with one admin (in private)
  • All chat is 1 to 1
• The end user and the admin user will thus use different clients
  • Admin can be in numerous chats to individual users
  • Users would typically be in one chat to one admin
• Admins can't create chats (only receive incoming) - but of course can reply

Answer 1

I don't think you want to use a namespace because then your server would have to be pre-listening on the server to every possible namespace in order to hear a connection to it. That seems impractical and inefficient. There are a number of different possible schemes. Here's one I think is fairly simple to implement.

1. You create one namespace for this admin chat.
2. Your server listens to that namespace and accepts incoming connections to it.
3. The client connects to that namespace when they want the chat with the admin.
4. The client then sends an initiateChat message with the API_KEY as data.
5. The server is coded to not accept any other messages until initiateChat has been received with a valid API_KEY
6. When the server receives the initiateChat message, it looks up the API_KEY in your database and if it finds it in the database and that user is currently online, it starts a chat session with them. If they are not currently available, it sends a message back to the client indicating they are not currently online.
7. Now the socket is open for chat related messages.
8. You can use a dynamically created room name to keep track of the two end points if you want and join both sockets to that room.
9. If the admin user can be involved in multiple chats with the same socket, then you will have to make sure the chat messages it sends are labeled with which chat they belong to so you know which room name to send the message to on your server.