Stream Controller: Channel Groups

Remarks#

When using Channel Groups, you should not add or remove channels in your client side applications. This example shows adding channels to a channel group and subscribing to that channel group for simplicity sake. But in a real world scenario, you should have your server do all the add/remove of channels to/from channel groups. When you enable Access Manager, you will need the manage permission to add/remove channels to/from channel groups and you should never grant the manage permission to clients for security reasons. Only your server should be granted the manage permission.

Subscribe with Channel Groups in JavaScript

With Stream Controller add-on enabled, you can use Channel Groups to subscribe to a 1000’s of channels from a single client. You do this by creating a channel group and adding channels to the channel group. We’ll assume pubnub variable has been initialized properly with your keys.

Create a generic callback handler function:

function displayCallback(m,e,c,d,f){
    console.log(JSON.stringify(m, null, 4));
}

Create channel group and add channels to it:

pubnub.channel_group_add_channel({
  callback: displayCallback,
  error: displayCallback,
  channel_group: "sports",
  channel: "football,baseball,basketball,lacrosse,cricket"
});

Now, subscribe to the channel group and you will be subscribed to all channels in that group:

pubnub.subscribe({
  callback: displayCallback,
  error: displayCallback,
  channel_group: "sports"
});

Any messages published to the channels in the channel group will be received in the displayCallback function.