Event Bus

EventBus is a simple JavaScript library for managing events. It can be used in both NodeJS and the browser.

The main driver for this library is enabling frontend microservices to interact with each other, allowing certain tasks to be deferred to another service, thus making our frontend microservices truly micro.

Examples

NodeJS

import EventBus from '@theiconic/eventbus';

const eventBus = new EventBus();
const wishlistTopic = eventBus.getTopic('wishlist');

wishlistTopic.addListener('update', (wishlistItem) => {
  console.log(`Wishlist item with SKU ${wishlistItem.sku} updated!`);
});

wishlistTopic.dispatch('update', { sku: 'MYSKU123', quantity: 1 });

Browser

Load EventBus

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/eventbus.min.js" />

Expose the instance on the window object:

<script type="text/javascript">
  window.eventBus = new EventBus();
</script>

Access it using angular

(function(angular, EventBus) {
    angular.module('ti.myservice').provider('myservice', [
        function() {
            var topic = EventBus.getTopic('mytopic');

            topic.addListener('my.event', (data) => {
              console.log('Do something with data!');
            });
        }
    ]);
})(angular, window.eventBus);

Or some other framework, such as React:

// window.ts

import { EventBus } from '@theiconic/eventbus';

declare var eventBus: EventBus;

export {
  eventBus: window.eventBus,
};

// mycomponent.tsx

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { Listener, Topic } from '@theiconic/eventbus';
import { eventBus } from './window';

export default class FooComponent extends Component {
    
    private topic: Topic = eventBus.getTopic('mytopic');
    private eventListener: Listener;

    constructor(props) {
      super(props);

      this.handleEvent = this.handleEvent.bind(this);
    }

    private handleEvent(data: any): void {
      this.setState({
        someprop: data.myprop,
      });
    }

    private componentWillMount() {
      this.eventListener = eventBus.addListener('myevent', this.handleEvent);
    }

    private componentWillUnmount() {
      this.eventListener.unbind();
    }

    render() {
        return (<div>{this.state.someprop}</div>)
    }
}

API

EventBus

getTopic(identifier, options): Topic

Create a new topic or return an existing one based on the identifier. A topic should represent a namespace for your events, e.g. orders, wishlist, cart.

Options:

Property	Description	Required	Default value
persistent	Whether messages should be queued if not consumed immediately. This will keep the messages in memory	false	false

getTopics(): Topic[]

Returns all registered topics for an EventBus instance.

Topic

addListener(binding: string, callback: (data: any) => void): Listener

Add a listener to an event binding. An event binding can be a wildcard, for example add.*. This is useful in scenarios where the event sent contains an ID like add.MYID and you want to capture all of these events.

Returns the listener instance.

removeListener(listener: Listener): void

Takes a listener object and will unbind it from the topic, not sending events to it anymore.

dispatch(event: string, data: any): void

Sends an event to all listeners, with any data of your choosing.

Note that this does not support wildcards.

Listener

unbind(): void

Unbinds a listener from its topic. This will prevent this listener from receiving any events.