Manage Polling

When you have multiple polls running concurrently or overlapping with one another, you should employ specific management techniques to ensure smooth operation.

• When you create new polls, make sure they have unique IDs.
• When you have created a new poll, you need to inform viewers that it is available.
• To control resource usage, you should remove old polls when they are finished.

Creating new polls

A poll ID exists for up to one week after the last vote is cast for it, in order to support
long-term poll auditing. If you run a poll with the same poll ID as an existing
one, the results are added the existing poll.

To create a fresh poll with zero votes, you must add a parameter to ensure that the new poll
ID is unique. This is typically a random number to be appended to the generated ID.
For a generated ID like this, you cannot hard-code for a particular poll ID you want to look up. Instead, you need to store ID value in a well-known state key:

The following code shows how to change the front end to use the indirection:

src/viewer.js

const sdk = new Muxy.SDK();
sdk
  .loaded()
  .then(() => {
    return sdk.getChannelState()
  })
  .then(state => {
    const pollID = state["poll"];
    const poll = state[pollID];

    document.getElementById("message").innerText = poll.prompt;
    document.getElementById("first").innerText = poll.options[0];
    document.getElementById("second").innerText = poll.options[1];
  });

Informing viewers of new polls

To reduce unnecessary network traffic, the GameLink API methods do not broadcast automatically.
Viewers are not notified when you create a new poll or set channel state. Unless you explicitly broadcast a message that a new poll is available, existing viewers will never see it show up.

To broadcast that new data is available, use the Broadcast Message node:

TODO When better JSON support is in the muxy plugin, show how to send
the state through the Broadcast Message call instead of having to
re-query channel state in the frontend

The following code shows how to change the front end to listen for this new event:

src/viewer.js

const sdk = new Muxy.SDK();

function updateState() {
  sdk.getChannelState()
    .then(state => {
     const pollID = state["poll"];
      const poll = state[pollID];

      document.getElementById("message").innerText = poll.prompt;
      document.getElementById("first").innerText = poll.options[0];
      document.getElementById("second").innerText = poll.options[1];
    });
}

sdk
  .loaded()
  .then(() => {
    sdk.listen("new_poll", () => {
      updateState();
    });

    updateState();
  });

Removing old polls

Creating a new poll adds a data entry to the channel state. To prevent stale polls from filling up the channel state value, use the Delete Poll node after a poll has finished:

For dynamic polling state like this, it is also good practice to clear out
all the existing state on startup so that the game starts with a known prior
state. This can be done by using the Clear Channel State node on connection:

Final Blueprint

For reference, an image of the complete blueprint is included below. This is not
well encapsulated blueprint code, but can be used as a basic reference for how to
do dynamic polling: