/RiotControl

Event Controller / Dispatcher For RiotJS, Inspired By Flux

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

RiotControl

UPDATE: Experimental multi-threaded version under dev branch.

npm install riotcontrol

A Simplistic Central Event Controller / Dispatcher For RiotJS, Inspired By Facebook's Flux Architecture Pattern.

RiotControl is, in the spirit of Riot itself, extremely lightweight. It forgoes elements of Flux, to favor small and simple applications. RiotControl passes events from views to stores, and back, relying heavily on Riot's observerable API. Stores can talk to many views, and views can talk to many stores.

Example data flow

Given the following:

  • A TodoList view (Riot tag)
    • Triggers actions/events through RiotControl and listens for data change events.
  • A TodoStore (generic JS data store)
    • Mix of model manager/MVC-pattern controller that listens for actions/events, performs business logic, and dispatches data changed events.

Possible data flow:

  1. TodoList view triggers 'todo_remove' event to RiotControl.
  2. RiotControl passes event along to stores.
  3. TodoStore implements a 'todo_remove' event handler, talks to back-end server.
  4. TodoStore triggers 'todos_changed' event, with new data. (new list with the todo removed)
  5. TodoList view implements a 'todos_changed' event handler, receiving new data, and updating the UI.

This encourages loosely coupled components. Stores house application logic and domain-specific data. Views comprise the user interface. Either side can be swapped out without interfering with the other. For example, a store that saves to local storage can be easily swapped for one that saves to a back-end service instead.

Demos

TodoList

Reference demo/todostore.js and todo.tag to understand how this works.

URL Routing Example

Reference routing_demo/index.html, itemstore.js, and item-app.tag

Binary Calculator

Things People Have Built

Flux Catalog

RiotJS version of the flux-comparison catalog.

Where Da Movies At

Map of all movies in a given location.

Usage

Requires Riot 2.0+

Include riotcontrol.js, or it's few lines of code, in your project.

API

Register the store in central dispatch, where store is a riot.observable(). Generally, all stores should be created and registered before the Riot app is mounted.

RiotControl.addStore(store)

// Example, at start of application:
var todoStore = new TodoStore() // Create a store instance.
RiotControl.addStore(todoStore) // Register the store in central dispatch.

Trigger event on all stores registered in central dispatch. Essentially, a 'broadcast' version of Riot's el.trigger() API.

RiotControl.trigger(event)
RiotControl.trigger(event, arg1 ... argN)

// Example, inside Riot view (tag):
RiotControl.trigger('todo_add', { title: self.text })

Listen for event, and execute callback when it is triggered. This applies to all stores registered, so that you may receive the same event from multiple sources.

RiotControl.on(event, callback)

// Example, inside Riot view (tag):
RiotControl.on('todos_changed', function(items) {
    self.items = items
    self.update()
})

Remove event listener.

RiotControl.off(event)

RiotControl.off(event, callback)

Same as RiotControl.on(), executes once.

RiotControl.one(event, callback)