[11.x] Adds anonymous broadcasting

[joedixon]

Sometimes you may wish to broadcast an ad-hoc event.

An ad-hoc event is one where you don't need to hook into it anywhere else in your application. You just want to notify the frontend of something.

For this, you don't want to go to the trouble of creating a brand new event, you just want to fire off a message.

For this, we can use an anonymous broadcast using the Broadcast facade, which can be as simple as:

Broadcast::on('my-channel')->send();

Results in...

{
    "event":"AnonymousBroadcastable",
    "data":"[]",
    "channel":"my-channel"
}

You may dispatch to multiple channels at the same time:

Broadcast::on(['my-channel', new PrivateChannel('my-channel'), 'presence-my-channel')->send();

You may also configure the name, payload, broadcasting connections and whether or not it should only be dispatched to others:

Broadcast::on('my-channel')
    ->as('my-event-name')
    ->with(['some' => 'array', 'of' => 'data'])
    ->via('reverb')
    ->toOthers()
    ->send();

Results in...

{
    "event":"my-event-name",
    "data":"{\"some\":\"array\",\"of\":\"data\"}",
    "channel":"test-channel"
}

Edit:

After feedback from @lukeraymonddowning, the following conveniences were added:

Broadcast::private('my-channel')->send();

Broadcast::presence('my-channel')->send();

[lukeraymonddowning]

Would it be worth having a Broadcast::private method as a little convenience helper?

Broadcast::private('my-channel')
    ->as('my-event-name')
    ->with(['some' => 'array', 'of' => 'data'])
    ->via('reverb')
    ->toOthers()
    ->send();

[joedixon]

Would it be worth having a Broadcast::private method as a little convenience helper?

Broadcast::private('my-channel')
    ->as('my-event-name')
    ->with(['some' => 'array', 'of' => 'data'])
    ->via('reverb')
    ->toOthers()
    ->send();

Consider it done 🚀

[devajmeireles]

Awesome! Will be a very good addition. I'd like to suggest an interesting addition in my opinion.

As we know Broadcast has two ways of being dispatched, ShouldBroadcast and ShouldBroadcastNow.

From what I can understand, this will always be dispatched using ShouldBroadcast, which requires queues.

So, it might be interesting to think about something like:

Broadcast::on('my-channel')->send();

Broadcast::on('my-channel')->sendNow();

Or simply:

Broadcast::on('my-channel')->send(queueable: false);

An easy way to achieve this result would be to change the implementation of send by making it consume two possible Broadcast classes. One implementing ShouldBroadcast and the other implementing ShouldBroadcastNow.

[taylorotwell]

@devajmeireles implemented.

[antonkomarev]

@joedixon Cool feature. But is there is a way to broadcast after db commit as we can do with events by implementing interface ShouldDispatchAfterCommit?