Chains

Allows for the declaration of Func<Type, Type>'s that are then chained together and executed synchronously or asynchronously with error handling and type checking built in. When execute asynchnously an event is fired when the execution of a chain has finished, the event contains the result or the error if one occured during excecution.

Usage

You can take a look at the example project for a set of examples show-casing both the synchnous and asynchnous usage. A (not at all real world) exmaple chain to generate a random array of integers and calculate the average is as follows:

Chain<int, double> chain = new Chain<int, double>()
  .Link<int>(x =>
  {
    // Generate random array of ints
    int[] nums = new int[x];
    Random rand = new Random();
    for (int i = 0; i < x; i++)
    {
      nums[i] = rand.Next(100);
    }
    return nums;
  })
  .Link<int[]>(x =>
  {
    // order the numbers (pointless but why not)
    return x.OrderBy(y => y).ToArray();
  })
  .Link<int[]>(x =>
  {
    // compute the average and return it
    double average = 0.0;
    for (int i = 0; i < x.Length; i++)
    {
      average += x[i];
    }
    return average / x.Length;
  });

chain.Execute(10);

---

TODO

• Add async methods following the async pattern (along-side events)
• Alter Chain so that a cast is not required, currently each Func<TIn, TOut> is wrapped in a Func<TIn, object> which casts TIn from object to TIn
• Add more control of how errors are handled, i.e. allow errors to be passed though the chain instead of stopping the execution so that links can handle the exception themselves
• Investigate methods to speed up execution of a chain