A lightweight, flexible event bus for JavaScript/TypeScript. Supports any type of event identifier, wildcard event names, and listener capacity control. You can even get an id from eventBus.on and get emit result from eventBus.emit!

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Installation

pnpm add wildcard-event
# or
npm install wildcard-event

Basic Usage

import { eventBus } from 'wildcard-event';

// Wildcard support
eventBus.on('user.*', () => console.log('Any user event!'));
eventBus.emit('user.logout'); // triggers wildcard

// Emit
const emitResult = eventBus.emit('user.login', { name: 'Alice' });

// Set the name of the eventBus
eventBus.name; // it is readonly
eventBus.setName('MyEventBus'); // eventBus.name is now 'MyEventBus'

Breaking Feature!

emit method now returns an object(interface: EmitResult). With the identifier-listener entry id, you can get the specific handler result if you want to.

// save the unique 'identifier-listener' id returned from `on` method
const listener = (user) => {
  console.log('User logged in:', user);
};
const id = eventBus.on('user.*', listener);

// emit an event and receive its result
const emitResult = eventBus.emit('user.login', { name: 'Alice' });

Then the emitResult will look like this:

expect(emitResult).toEqual({
  ids: [id], // array of listener ids that were triggered
  [id]: {
    identifier: 'user.*', // the matched identifier when it was registered
    result: listener({ name: 'Alice' }), // result of the listener
    rest: Infinity, // remaining capacity (if set)
  },
});

Note: The listener can be an async function, which makes emitResult[someId].result a Promise.

API

eventBus.on(identifier, listener, capacity?)

Register a listener for an event. identifier can be any value. capacity (optional) limits how many times the listener can be triggered.

• Default capacity is Infinity.
• When emitting, the listeners will be called in the order they were registered.

eventBus.once(identifier, listener)

Register a listener that will be triggered only once.

eventBus.off(identifier)

Remove all listeners for the given event identifier.

eventBus.removeListener(id)

Remove a specific listener by its id (returned from on/once).

eventBus.emit(identifier, ...args)

Trigger an event. Returns null if no listener is found, or an object with results and remaining capacity.

Wildcard Rules

1. * matches a single segment (e.g. user.* matches user.login, not user.profile.update)
2. ** matches multiple segments (e.g. user.** matches user.login, user.profile.update, user.settings.privacy.change, and user itself)
3. Cannot use both ** and * in the same identifier
4. Cannot use more than 2 *s, like *** or more
5. Cannot start or end with a dot (.).
6. Mixed: user.*.settings matches user.admin.settings, user.guest.settings
7. Only registration (on/once) supports wildcards; emit must use concrete event names

Types

type Fn = (...args: unknown[]) => unknown;
interface EventConfig {
  listener: Fn;
  capacity: number;
}
interface EmitResultValue {
  identifier: unknown;
  result: unknown;
  rest: number;
}
interface EmitResult {
  ids: number[];
  [key: number]: EmitResultValue;
}

Author

Kasukabe Tsumugi
futami16237@gmail.com

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Enjoy! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ