iOS: Unable to fetch Offline messages for XMPP Chat - ios

I am facing an issue with the presence status, following the documentation and XMPPframework example code. I have written a chat application.
Problem : When the user 1 & 2 are online I get the status successfully and they can chat with each other. However when the user 2 goes physically offline via (Wifi OFF / 3G Off) User 1 is not getting the offline status from XMPP and hence what ever messages are sent from that instant of time are lost when the user 2 comes online.
It seems since the user 2 is not notified or stored as offline in XMPP and hence its not storing the offline messages to push back to user 2 when it comes online.
I have tried to resolve this by explicitly writing a [goOffline] call to XMPP, however the call is shown in 'SEND log' for 'user 2' but not received in 'RECV log' in user 1 from XMPP, due to which the message are lost in between.
Also tried with other sources replies.
Set status for presence available and send XMPP
priority changed with values non-negative
XMPPArchiving work but this is not what I wanted.
Server side Mod_zero push enables but get only first message push notification sometimes.
Setting limit on ejabberd.cfg file for users and offline message limit.
request for offline message pull.
Can anyone help me with this?

This is very typical situation where client losses network but server can't detect that it is offline.
To detect status of each client, server need to send PING packets to every client and wait for response.
If client responds then fine otherwise server will mark that client as offline and every other online client will be informed automatically.
Here is PING Module implementation for ejabberd XMPP Server (hope you are using ejabberd server):
mod_ping:
send_pings: true
ping_interval: 10
timeout_action: kill
ping_ack_timeout: 10
This has to be written in ejabberd.yml configuration file.
At client side also we need to enable ping module to respond to server pings as:
private var xmppPing: XMPPPing?
xmppPing = XMPPPing()
xmppPing!.activate(xmppStream!)
This code has to be written while we setupStream() for iOS.
For detailed info, please go through mod_ping documentations.

Sounds like your problem is at server level. The server thinks that the user is online so it sends the message but nobody gets it. This does not really have a simple solution.
1.
The best solution would be delivery receipts. Where basically when the message is sent to your client, your client returns a confirmation of delivery receipt. If the server does not get that receipt it would resend the message every n time. Depending on your XMPP server you might find a already made solution, of not you would have to roll out your own.
2.
A possible hack would be to have your server always store and deliver last 10 messages and then at client side you discard repeated... This also depends on your server implementation. XMPP MUC and PubSub have resources along these lines.
For a long term scalable solution, you'll need to deal with this both at server and client level.

Related

Google iot core connection status

I am using Google IOT core with mongoose os. I wanted to update device connection status to firestore. But i am unable to find event which reports mqtt connection status to pub/sub like when device disconnects or reconnect i.e if device is offline or not.
I am stuck on this problem for days.Any help will be appreciated
Update
As #devunwired mentioned in this response it is now possible to monitor Stackdriver logs for disconnect events. You must have at a minimum enabled INFO level logging on your project in IoT Core > Registries > [your registry] > Edit Registry > Select "Info" log level > Click save.
Original Response
There are a few values you can look at that are tracked in device configuration metadata that you could use to know when a device last was online:
Last Configuration Send time - sent anytime your device connects /
configuration is posted
Last Event Time - Last time an event was sent from the device
Last State Time - Last time state was sent from the device
Last Heartbeat time - Last time MQTT heartbeat was sent
To get you started, here is an example using API explorer that you can fill-in with your project ID, region, registry, and device to query for a specific device's metadata.
For 1...3 you have control over these through device manager and by publishing data. MQTT heartbeat is updated if your device sends an MQTT_PINGREQ message during the "ping period" without other messages getting sent.
At any rate, you could use any of these update time values to see the last time a device was online / functioning. You could query the states of your devices after listing the devices in a registry and could update a Firebase RTDB periodically if that's how you want to report (e.g. using AppEngine TaskQueue). Note that you also just can get these "last connected" values from the Google Cloud Console.
It was said before but we don't have an event for disconnect, just configuration ack, which generally is the connection event. If you want to share state between a device and the device manager, use state messages.
Unfortunately, there's no built in way to do this right now as there aren't events on this state.
However, you could implement a hack by sending a message on connect/disconnect from the device that you have a Cloud Function subscribed to the Pub/Sub topic listening for. It's not perfect as it would fail in the case where the device disconnected unexpectedly.
There currently is no way to do this, that i've been able to find (a year later after this original post). I posted a question here on SO regarding this as well, with more details and link to example code I had to use for handling this:
Google Core IoT Device Offline Event or Connection Status
The AWS IoT platform publishes messages on a special MQTT topic (prefixed with $aws) when your device connects/disconnects. You can easily use these to monitor these events - however, you should be aware that the MQTT protocol is designed to be robust to a poor networking conditions and the broker on the AWS side probably doesn't think it's a bit deal to disconnect a client. The broker expects that the client will just reconnect and queue messages for a moment during that process (which can be a big deal on a microcontroller).
All that being said, the AWS topics you would watch are:
$aws/events/presence/connected/{clientId}
and
$aws/events/presence/disconnected/{clientId}
and the documentation for these (and other) lifecycle events are located: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/life-cycle-events.html

Ejabberd offline messages

I have set up a chat server with Ejabberd, It is working fine. Messages are getting sent from one user to another user. Problem is that when the receiving user is offline, Sender messages should get stored and get delivered to receiver when he comes back to online. But offline messages are not getting delivered. I have not changed anything in configuration file because it looks already configured for the offline storage and offline message delivery. Do I need to make any other changes apart from the below lines?
ejabberd.cfg:
{access, max_user_offline_messages, [{5000, admin}, {100, all}]}.
{mod_offline, [{access_max_user_messages, max_user_offline_messages}]}
Please update your ejabberd from 2.1.10 to 16.10, as you using the older version certain func. may not work as expected.

iOS Remote Notifications Badge Count Strategy When Network Connection Is Poor

I am trying to understand the best practice for remote notifications on iOS when the user has a particularly poor network connection or no network connection.
The scenario is such:
The user gets some remote notifications and at some point in the future opens the app. At this point I wan't to let the server know ASAP that the badge count is now zero. I am using server side badge count management as the only way you can update the icon badge reliably is in the APNS payload. However the call to the server fails as there is no network connectivity. Then the user puts the app into the background so I can't make any further calls to the server if network came back. Subsequently a new remote notification comes in but the badge number is wrong because the server doesn't know it needed to be zeroed.
Am I missing something here? Any advice gratefully received as I haven't found any articles online dealing with this scenario.
Yes, you have implemented in right way. We can't do anything if there is problem in internet connection. Badge count is managed by server only. So, whenever you open application, application will update Zero to server. Now, if it is not properly updated to server then it is not possible to manage it from Mobile side.

XMPP client network failure and Openfire offline message

I have configured XMPP client (iOS) and Openfire , everything works just fine except that i am not able to handle the following situation.
iOS client disconnects because of network failure.
User is still logged in on the server because there is no way to disconnect(no network).
Further messages are not stored in server because server thinks that the user is still logged in. Hence the messages are lost.
Unable to send push notification by sender because the receiver(User) status is still online ( no network to send presence ).
How can i solve this issue?
I found a solution, not sure if it is efficient.
In Openfire admin portal, under Client Connection Settings->Idle Connections Policy, there is an option to disconnect the client if it is idle for x seconds. By default it is 360 seconds, i have changed it to 5 seconds so that the messages won't get lost.
I am not sure if its a good idea to ping the clients every 5 seconds.

Losing messages over lost connection xmpp

i went through this question
Lost messages over XMPP on device disconnected
but there is no answer.
When a connection is lost due to some network issue then the server is not able to recognize it and keeps on sending messages to disconnected receiver which are permanently lost.
I have a workaround in which i ping the client from server and when the client gets disconnected server is able to recognize it after 10 sec and save further messages in queue preventing them from being lost.
my question is can 100% fail save message delivery be achieved by using some other way i know psi and many other xmpp client are doing it.
on ios side i am using xmppframework
One way is to employ the Advanced Message Processing (AMP) on your server; another one is to employ the Message Delivery Receipts on your clients.
The former one requires an AMP-enabled server implementation and the initiating client has to be able to tell the server what kind of delivery status reports it wants (it wants an error to be returned if the delivery is not possible). Note that this is not bullet-proof anyway as there is a window between the moment the target client losts its connectivity with the server and the moment the TCP stack on the server's machine detects this and tells the server about it: during this window, everything sent to the client is considered by the server to be sent okay because there's no concept of message boundaries in the TCP layer and hence if the server process managed to stuff a message stanza's XML into the system buffers of its TCP connection, it considers that stanza to be sent—there's no way for it to know which bits of its stream did not get to the receiver once the TCP stack says the connection is lost.
The latter one is bullet-proof as the clients rely on explicit notifications about message reception. This does increase chattiness though. In return, no server support for this feature is required—it's implemented solely in the clients.
go with XEP-0198 and enjoy...
http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html
For a XMPP client I'm working on, the following mechanism is used:
Add Reachability to the project, to detect quickly when the phone is having connectivity problems.
Use a modified version of XEP-0198, adding a confirmation sent by the server. So, the client sends a message, the server confirms with a receipt. Later on, the receiving user will also confirm with a receipt. For each message you send, you get two confirmations, one from the server, one from the client. This requires modifications on the server of course.
When the app is not connected to the XMPP server, messages are queued.
When the app is logged in again to the XMPP server, the app takes all messages which were not confirmed by the server and sends them again.
For this to work, you have to locally store the messages in the app with three possible states: "Not sent", "Confirmed by server", "Confirmed by user"

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