Sounds like what you want is a "Central" device. This would be the server or iOS/Android app.
The Bean's are peripheral devices. A bean peripheral device can connect to one and only one central device at a time.
A Central device can connect to many peripheral devices at one time. And it is the central device that issues the connect request.
Well actually, the peripheral device while not connected sends out advertising packets. The central device see's those advertising packets and decides if it care about what you are advertising. If so, a connect request is issued to the peripheral device who the accepts the connect request and no you've got a conversation going.
Now for the bad news. Bean or Bean+ can not act as a central device.
But, with the newer firmware versions, a bean can be an observer. This is like living in the gray world between peripheral and central devices. The Advertiser can send custom data using Bean.setCustomAdvertisement
The other side of pair is handled by Bean.getObserverMessage which can see that info.
There are of course issues. The biggest being that PTD's documentation pretty much sucks on this.
Get over that hump and there are other issues. When I was playing with this, was hopping to get 100ms turn around. Eg: Advertiser sends a message and 100ms or less the observer get's it. Wrong. It's more like 3-5 SECONDS. And that just wont work in my app.
Another issue is that the getObserverMessage gets the first message it finds. Great if you have a single advertiser and single Observer. But what if it is a many to many relationship? I never got that far because of the lag time so can't answer that question. This might be handled with cofiguration settings, device naming conventions or things of that nature. But then you have to have a central device with a UI to do that. Gets messy fast.
Another issue is that the Advertiser throws data onto the radio waves. It has no idea of it is picked up by anything that wants it. Sorta like the UDP protocol of TCP/IP. Great for broadcasting where lost packets are no problem. Not so great when you need a conversation and assurance that the data you send is received by something.
