How to implement real time data for a web page

SignalR

This is the answer I’m most excited to share, because it represents a much cleaner implementation that is lightweight and works well in today’s mobile (data constricted) environment.

There have been several methods over the years to provide “realtime” pushing of data from the server to the client (or the appearance of pushing data). Rapid Short Polling (similar to my AJAX based answers), Long Polling, Forever Frame, Server Sent Events, and WebSockets are different transport mechanisms used to achieve this. SignalR is an abstraction layer capable of selecting an appropriate transport mechanism based on the client and server’s capabilities. The best part of using SignalR is that it’s simple. You don’t have to worry about the transport mechanism, and the programming model is easy to understand.

I’m going to define a SignalR hub, but just leave it empty.

public class GameHub : Hub
    {
    }

When I add data to the “database”, I’m going to run the below bit of code. If you read the question, you’ll see I commented it out in the “create” form. You’ll want to uncomment that.

var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<GameHub>();
context.Clients.All.addGame(game);

Here’s my page code:

<h1>SignalR</h1>
        <asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="BoardGameRepeater" ItemType="RealTimeDemo.Models.BoardGame">
            <HeaderTemplate>
                <table border="1">
                    <thead>
                        <tr>
                            <th>Id</th>
                            <th>Name</th>
                            <th>Description</th>
                            <th>Quantity</th>
                            <th>Price</th>
                        </tr>
                    </thead>
                    <tbody id="BoardGameTblBody">
            </HeaderTemplate>
            <ItemTemplate>
                <tr>
                    <td><%#: Item.Id %></td>
                    <td><%#: Item.Name %></td>
                    <td><%#: Item.Description %></td>
                    <td><%#: Item.Quantity %></td>
                    <td><%#: Item.Price %></td>
                </tr>
            </ItemTemplate>
            <FooterTemplate></tbody></table></FooterTemplate>
        </asp:Repeater>
        <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script src="Scripts/jQuery-1.6.4.min.js"></script>
        <script src="Scripts/jquery.signalR-2.1.1.min.js"></script>
        <script src="signalr/hubs"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            var hub = $.connection.gameHub;
            hub.client.addGame = function (game) {
                $("#BoardGameTblBody").append("<tr><td>" + game.Id + "</td><td>" + game.Name + "</td><td>" + game.Description + "</td><td>" + game.Quantity + "</td><td>" + game.Price + "</td></tr>");
            };
            $.connection.hub.start();
        </script>

And the code behind:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
        BoardGameRepeater.DataSource = Application["BoardGameDatabase"];
        BoardGameRepeater.DataBind();
        }

Notice what’s happening here. When the server calls context.Clients.All.addGame(game); it’s executing the function that’s been assigned to hub.client.addGame for every client that is connected to the GameHub. SignalR is taking care of wiring up the events for me, and automatically converting my game object on the server to the game object on the client. And best of all, there’s no network traffic back and forth every few seconds, so it’s incredibly lightweight.

Advantages:

• Very light on the network traffic
• Easy to develop, but still flexible
• Doesn’t send viewstate with the request
• Doesn’t poll the server continuously.

Note, you could add a function on the client for editedGame for pushing changed data out to the client easily (same for delete).