Responsible for various functions of the campaign:
- Event logging (tracking of pageview, share, email etc stats)
- Email sends (legislator contact engine)
- Statistics reading (for display of logged event totals on the site)
- Tweets reading (for supporter list at base of site)
The webserver component is a simple express.io implementation. The main web.js spawns a server instance and listens on various endpoints handled by the other scripts. Each route handler callback has access to the main express app object via this.
The socket server broadcasts events to all clients when the /log endpoint is hit. These events all receive an array of legislator IDs which indicate the relevant legislators for the event. Where an empty legislators array is passed the event is a global one (for example, website pageview has no affiliation to any particular legislator). Any of the following events can be sent: views, calls, emails, tweets or facebooks.
Files in the workers directory are spawned as forever daemons and run continually to draw in necessary data.
tweets.jspolls a hash tag and pulls in matching tweets to our mongodb replicaset for querying
- Errors are only thrown on mongo connection failures; this causes Forever to reboot the server and is effectively an auto-reconnect. For non-critical problems, we call
console.warn()so that Forever can pick that up and email it to an alert box as with the errors. Shouldn't lose any statistics data even with a DB failure as we can increment by counting error log lines.