event_emitter: Generic Event Emitter

In gaborcsardi/async: Asynchronous Computation and 'I/O'

Generic Event Emitter

Description

This is a generic class that can be used to create event emitters. It is mostly modelled after the 'node.js' EventEmitter class

Usage

ee <- event_emitter$new(async = TRUE)
ee$listen_on(event, callback)
ee$listen_off(event, callback)
ee$listen_once(event, callback)
ee$emit(event, ...)
ee$get_event_names()
ee$get_listener_count(event)
ee$remove_all_listeners(event)

Arguments

• async: Whether to call listeners asynchronously, i.e. in the next tick of the event loop.

• event: String, name of the event.

• callback: Function, listener to call when the event is emitted. Its arguments must match the arguments passed to the ⁠$emit()⁠ method. It is possible to add the same callback function multiple times as a listener. It will be called as many times, as many times it was added.

• ...: Arguments to pass to the listeners. They can be named or unnnamed.

Details

ee$listen_on() adds callback as a new listener for event. It is always added to the end of the listener list. Listeners will be called in the order they were added. It returns a reference to the event_emitter object, so calls can be chained.

ee$listen_off() removes the first instance of callback from the listener list of event. It uses base::identical() to find the listener to remove. If callback is not among the listeners, nothing happens. Note that if you call this method from an event handler, that does not affect the already emitted events. It returns a reference to the event_emitter object, so calls can be chained.

ee$listen_once is similar to ee$listen_on(), but the callback will be only called for a single event, and then it will be removed. (Technically, the listener is removed before the callback is called.) It returns a reference to the event_emitter object, so calls can be chained.

ee$emit() emits an event. All listeners in its listener list will be called, in the order they were added. The arguments are passed to the listeners, so they have to be compatible with them.

ee$get_event_names() returns the names of the active events, in a character vector. An event is active if it has at least one listener.

ee$get_listener_count() returns the number of listeners for an event.

ee$remove_all_listener() removes all listeners for an an event.

Error handling

Errors are handled by special error events. If a listener errors, and the event emitter has an active error event (i.e. some listeners exist for error, then all listeners are called, in the order they were specified. They receive the originally thrown error object as the single argument. The error object has an event entry, which contains the event name the failed listener was called on.

If the event emitter does not have any listeners for the error event, then it throws an error. This error propagates to the next synchronization barrier, i.e. the last synchronise() or run_event_loop() call, which fails.

In an error happen within an error listener, then the same happens, the last synchronise() or run_event_loop() call fails. You can wrap the body of the error listeners in a tryCatch() call, if you want to avoid this.

gaborcsardi/async documentation built on Nov. 20, 2024, 4:51 p.m.