Track Client Presence in Your Flows

You can now track which clients are connected to your dashboard, and react when one joins or leaves, directly from your flows.

Every client now carries a stable clientId on msg._client. The old socketId changed on every reconnect, sleep, or page reload, so anything you stored against it broke the moment the connection blipped. The clientId stays the same for that browser across reconnects and restarts, which makes it a reliable key for per-client state.

The ui-control node can now emit presence events keyed on that id. Set its Output to Client Presence Events Only and it sends:

• client-connected when a new client first connects
• client-reconnected when a client returns after a brief drop
• client-gone when a client leaves and does not come back

A grace window means a quick refresh or network blip does not fire client-gone. A client that returns within 20 seconds is reported as client-reconnected instead, so you only hear about genuine departures. Use these to keep an accurate map of who is currently viewing your dashboard: add on connect, keep on reconnect, remove on gone.

Reopening the same browser produces client-reconnected rather than a second client-connected, so the client keeps its place in your map. The recording uses a shortened grace window so the events fit on screen; the real window is 20 seconds.

Note: if you have ui-control nodes set to All Events, they will now also emit the client-* presence messages. The client- prefix keeps them distinct from the existing connect / lost events, so flows that switch on msg.payload are unaffected, but a flow that reacts to every message from that node will see the new ones.

clientId identifies a browser for presence and routing, not a user for authorization. The browser supplies it, so treat it the way you would any other client-supplied value.

This feature is available to all FlowFuse Dashboard users from v1.32.0, on FlowFuse Cloud and Self Hosted.