Getting Information about users viewing the page.

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi All,

I would like to implement a feature like, I Would like to know which all users are currently viewing a page in my Rails Application at any given instant. I use Restful Authentication plugin for User Authentication.

Any Suggestions regarding how I can proceed on this ,would be really helpful.

Thanks, Charanya.

2

Since HTTP is stateless protocol you haven't such opportunity. But of course there are some ways to emulate such things.

Here are the brief review for some of them: * you may check the time of last viewed page for authenticated users e.g. everyone who visited the site within 5 minutes is online. * with the same approach you may try to track non-authenticated users by their IP addresses (but don't forget to take care of all related stuff in this case, like removing expired visit records from your DB ) * also you may try to add some AJAX script which will pull the server each 3 minutes from browser, which give you to know that user is online but just viewing the same page...