Thursday, 28 March 2013

Milestone: Events and Scripting

Big update today - added scripting and more efficient adding of instances.

Over the past few days I've been struggling with the composition of the event subscription model. I knew I wanted to have scripting in there somewhere, but I wasn't entirely sure where. However, I think I've reached the right kind of shape for it.

When Collections, Instances or Items are added to a Database, an event will be raised and broadcasted to any Subscribers that are listed in the Database. Each Subscriber is connected to an EventDefinition that describes both the trigger criteria and name of an action to be raised if that trigger fires.

An IronPython scripting engine has been added so that the trigger script of an EventDefinition can be interpreted as an expression yielding true or false. The event type, User, Database and the Collection, Instance, Item (as appropriate) are available to the IronPython script. At the moment, the test case is simply returning true if an Instance type matches a particular criteria.

The scripting engine is called asynchronously using a Task construct once the API has completed its operation. I've not used Tasks before so this is experimental for now and I'm not sure how they work under Mono yet. The engine is pluggable, so other scripting languages could also be made available in the future.

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