Observe data for changes?

General
1

I’m trying to figure out how to observe a database for changes, but I can’t find any up-to-date information on how to do it. I found some several years old threads in various forums that say that it’s not possible out-of-the-box, and that the solution is to implement some custom code in a afterUpdate event handler to push a message to clients that are subscribed to some custom channel…

This sounds a bit convoluted - I’m just trying this out in an effort to compare Backendless to Firebase, and in Firebase it’s as simple as doing

    var ref = firebase.database().ref('messages/test');    
    ref.on('value', function(snapshot) {
        console.log("Value changed, new value: '" + snapshot.val().message + "'");
    }

I’m kind of surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a straight forward way of doing this in Backendless, but maybe I just didn’t look in the right place?

2

Hi Magnus,

Backendless does not support real-time updated on the client-side out of the box. The workaround you found is indeed what I would recommend. I agree, it is not as straight-forward as you’d get with Firebase, but it gives you a high degree of control. We have real-time updates on our roadmap for version 4 of Backendless.

Regards,
Mark