ActionCable unable to call on periodic timers

Question

This is not documented in Rails, but ActionCable has a module called PeriodicTimers https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actioncable/lib/action_cable/channel/periodic_timers.rb

Now in my app/channels/requests_channel.rb I have attempted to test this out by doing:

class RequestsChannel < ApplicationCable::Channel
  periodically :transmit_status, every: 2.seconds

  def subscribed
      stream_from "requests_#{current_user.id}"
  end

  def unsubscribed
  end

  private

  def transmit_status
    puts "ping"
  end
end

and when I connect and subscribe to the stream, nothing shows up in the console. I felt like the code in ActionCable was fairly straight forward, and that this should work but I'm unable to get it to work. Anybody have any experience with this?

Answer 1

In Rails 5.2.0, both

  periodically every: 5.seconds do
    transmit payload: 'some_payload'
  end

And,

periodically :transmit_device_status, every: 5.seconds

def transmit_device_status
  transmit payload: 'some_payload'
end

Worked for me on the first try. I can't tell you why it wasn't working for you initially sorry, but it might help someone else since this is one of the very few posts I found on the subject.