My current project at Microserve is a Drupal 8 website that uses the
Private Message module for users to send messages to each other.
In some cases though, the threads could contain hundreds of recipients so I
decided that it would be good to queue the message requests so that they can be
processed as part of a background process for better performance. The Private
Message module does not include this, so I've written and released a separate
Private Message Queue module.
Queuing a Message
The module provices a PrivateMessageQueuer service
(private_message_queue.queuer) which queues the items via the queue()
method.
The method accepts an array of User objects as the messsage recipients, the
message body text and another user as the message owner. (I’m currently
considering whether to make the owner optional, and default to the current
user if one is not specified)
Here is an example:
$recipients = $this->getRecipients(); // An array of User objects.
$message = 'Some message text';
$owner = \Drupal::currentUser();
$queuer = \Drupal::service('private_message_queue.queuer');
$queuer->queue($recipients, $message, $owner);
These three pieces of data are then saved as part of the queued item. You can
see these by checking the "queue" table in the database or by running
drush queue-list.
$ drush queue-list
Queue Items Class
private_message_queue 19 Drupal\Core\Queue\DatabaseQueue
Processing the Queue
The module also provides a PrivateMessageQueue queue worker, which processes
the queued items. For each item, it creates a new private message setting the
owner and the message body.
It uses the PrivateMessageThread class from the Private Message module to find
for an existing thread for the specified recipients, or creates a new thread if
one isn't found. The new message is then added to the thread.
The queue is processed on each cron run, so I recommend adding a module like
Ultimate Cron so that you can process the queued items frequently (e.g.
every 15 minutes) and run the heavier tasks like checking for updates etc less
frequently (e.g. once a day).
You can also process the queue manually with Drush using the
drush queue-run <queue-name> command - e.g.
drush queue-run private_message_queue.
$ drush queue-run private_message_queue
Processed 19 items from the private_message_queue queue in 3.34 sec.
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About me
I'm an Acquia-certified Drupal Triple Expert with 17 years of experience, an open-source software maintainer and Drupal core contributor, public speaker, live streamer, and host of the Beyond Blocks podcast.