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• Client list
• Client join and part events
• User object

Building collaborative applications is usually easier if you, as a developer, have access to information about the other collaborators/clients as well as information about your own clients. Webstrates facilitates this through its client list and user object functionality.

Client list

A full list of clients connected to a webstrate can be accessed through webstrate.clients. The list contains the Client IDs of all clients currently connected to the webstrate. A call to webstrate.clients from a webstrate with 4 clients connected could look something like this:

["ryr0xnt57", "BJNwZnFqQ", "H14DZ3tqm", "ryrPW3YcX"]

The client’s own Client ID can be found in webstrate.clientId.

Other than to simply identify clients, these Client IDs are also used to send signal between clients as well as sending messages.

Client IDs are randomly generated and not persisted between sessions, i.e. leaving and rejoining a webstrate will give the client a new Client ID.

Client join and part events

To monitor the comings and goings of clients, the user may subscribe to the clientJoin and clientPart events. To see a full list of events and how to subscribe to them, see the Events documentation page.

webstrate.on("clientJoin", function(clientId) {
  // User with clientId has just joined the webstrate.
});

User object

When a user is logged in with an OAuth provider, the webstrate.user object will be defined, containing a bunch of information about the current user:

• allClients – an object containing all user’s currently connected clients to any webstrate. This object also includes the webstrateId, the user’s IP address, as well as the user’s user agent string.
• clients – a simplified list of allClients, only containing Client IDs (same format as webstrate.clients).
• cookies – all the user’s cookies.
• displayName – the user’s display name as defined by the OAuth provider.
• on and off – functions for attaching event listeners for things like user object signaling.
• permissions – the user’s permissions in the current document.
• provider – the identifier for the OAuth provider.
• userId – the user’s username and provider joined together by a :. Note that a user’s User ID is different from their Client ID.
• userUrl – a URL to the user’s homepage as defined by the OAuth provider.
• username – the user’s username as defined by the OAuth provider.
• signal – a function used to send signals on the user object.