Ember FSM

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Maintenance Mode

Ember FSM was a lot of fun to develop 4 years ago when this all made a lot of sense to me, it's still used in some places and I will continue to maintain it to prevent apps from breaking. If you think the Ember community still needs a library like this with newer/better features please fork it and I will let people know where to go! Thanks for understanding 🙂

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A promise-aware finite state machine implementation for Ember

A wild (and current) traffic light demo appears!

import FSM from 'ember-fsm';

let trafficSignal = FSM.Machine.create({
  events: {
    cycle: {
      transitions: [
        { initialized: 'red' },
        { red: 'green' },
        { green: 'amber' },
        { amber: 'red' }
      ]
    },

    powerDown: {
      transition: { $all: 'off' }
    }
  }
});

trafficSignal.get('currentState');
// "initialized"

trafficSignal.send('cycle');
trafficSignal.get('currentState');
// "red"

trafficSignal.send('cycle');
trafficSignal.get('currentState')
// "green"

Getting Started

Install as an Ember Addon

ember install ember-fsm

Do you need this?

Try really hard not to need it, if you need it, I'm sorry. -- @heycarsten

Defining a State Machine

import FSM from 'ember-fsm';

let SleepyFSM = FSM.Machine.extend({
  // Here is where you define your state machine's state-specific configuration.
  // This section is optional.
  states: {
    // The default initial state is "initialized"
    initialState: 'awake'

    // If you'd like, you can choose to explicitly define the names of your
    // states:
    knownStates: ['sleeping', 'angry', 'awake', 'initialized', 'failed'],

    // You can define global per-state callbacks, they will fire whenever the
    // state will be entered, was entered, will be exited, or was exited.
    sleeping: {
      willEnter() { },
      didEnter() { },
      willExit() { },
      didExit() { }
    }
  },

  // Here's where you define your state machine's events, it is required.
  events: {
    sleep: {
      // You can define global per-event callbacks. These will fire for any
      // transition before or after this event.
      before() { },
      after() { },

      // This is where the event's transitions are defined, it is also aliased
      // to "transition". It can accept either a single object like one in the
      // array below, or an array of transition definition objects:
      transitions: [
        { awake: 'sleeping', doUnless: 'unableToSleep' },
        { awake: 'angry', doIf: 'unableToSleep' },
        { sleeping: '$same' }
      ]
    },

    // By default this error event is injected into your state machine for you,
    // you can override it and provide your own transitions and callbacks if
    // you'd like.
    error: {
      transition: { $all: 'failed' }
    }
  }
});

State Macros

For the sake of less typing (and less chances of introducing failure) the following macros can be used in transition definitions:

Macro	Description
$all	Expands to all known states.
$same	Expands to the same state as the from state. transition: { sleeping: '$same' }
$initial	Expands to the initial state.

Transition Guarding

You can specify that a transition be excluded or included in the event using doIf or doUnless. Consider SleepyFSM above, if we set unableToSleep to true then when we send in the sleep event, it will transition to the state angry because the transition { awake: 'sleeping' } will be excluded from the list.

doIf and doUnless are aliased to guard and unless respectively.

Transition Events & Callbacks

Given the SleepyFSM example above, suppose we ran the following:

let fsm = SleepyFSM.create();
fsm.send('sleep');

Here is the series of transition events that will occurr and the corresponding callbacks that will run and where they can be defined:

Current State	Is Active	Event	Runs callbacks
awake	false	beforeEvent	before on events and transitions
awake	true	_activateTransition_	internal
awake	true	willExit	willExit on states and transitions
awake	true	willEnter	willEnter on states and transitions
sleeping	true	_setNewState_	internal
sleeping	true	didExit	didExit on states and transitions
sleeping	true	didEnter	didEnter on states and transitions
sleeping	false	_deactivateTransition_	internal
sleeping	false	afterEvent	after on events and transitions

Some of the event names above also have aliases:

Event	Aliases
beforeEvent	before
afterEvent	after
didEnter	enter, action
didExit	exit

Asynchronicity In Callbacks

If callbacks return a promise, the next callback in the chain will not fire until the promise is resolved. The return value of callbacks is stored in the transition's resolutions object. Likewise, rejections are stored in the rejections object of the transition.

Namespacing States

ember-fsm doesn't provide true sub-state support, but you can namespace your states. For example, suppose a portion of your state workflow is related in some way; you can prefix those states with a namespace:

• ready
• uploading.requestingUrl
• uploading.sendingData
• processing.enqueuing
• processing.working
• finished

When you define states like this, Ember.FSM automatically generates the following boolean accessor properties for you:

• isInReady
• isInUploading
• isInUploadingRequestingUrl
• isInUploadingSendingData
• isInProcessing
• isInProcessingEnqueuing
• isInProcessingWorking
• isInFinished

Stateful Mixin

When it comes to using ember-fsm in your application, you'll almost always want to use FSM.Stateful over sub-classing FSM.Machine. This way you can formalize a state workflow around something like file uploads where you might have to incorporate three different proceesses into on user experience.

Note: States and events are renamed in the mixin to fsmStates and fsmEvents respectively, to avoid conflict with core Ember properties.

Building these sorts of workflows implicitly as-you-code-along can be a recipie for massive sadness. So why be sad? Formalize that workflow! Here's an example of how adding ember-fsm to a controller can remove a lot of the tedious parts of workflow managment:

import Ember from 'ember';
import FSM from 'ember-fsm';

// controllers/upload.js
export default Ember.Controller.extend(FSM.Stateful, {
  needs: 'notifier',

  actions: {
    uploadFile(file) {
      this.set('file', file);
      this.sendStateEvent('addFile');
    }
  },

  fsmStates: {
    initialState: 'nofile'
  },

  fsmEvents: {
    addFile: {
      transitions: {
        from:   ['nofile', 'failed'],
        to:     'ready',
        before: 'checkFile',
      }
    },

    startUpload: {
      transitions: {
        from:     'ready',
        to:       'uploading',
        before:   'getUploadURL',
        didEnter: 'performUpload',
        after:    'finishedUpload'
      }
    },

    finishUpload: {
      transition: { uploading: 'nofile', didEnter: 'reset' }
    }
  },

  reset() {
    this.set('file', null);
  },

  checkFile() {
    let file = this.get('file');

    if (file.size > 0) {
      return;
    } else {
      this.get('controllers.notifier').warn('file must have content');
      FSM.reject(); // A helper for throwing an error
    }
  },

  getUploadURL() {
    let fileName = this.get('file.name');

    let xhr = Ember.$.ajax('/api/signed_uploads', {
      type: 'put',
      data: { file: { name: fileName } }
    });

    xhr.then((payload) => {
      Ember.run(() => {
        this.set('uploadToURL', payload.signed_upload.url);
      });
    });

    return xhr; // Causes transition to block until promise is settled
  },

  performUpload() {
    return Ember.$.ajax(this.get('uploadToURL'), {
      type: 'put',
      data: this.get('file')
    });
  },

  finishedUpload() {
    this.get('controllers.notifier').success('Upload complete');
    this.sendStateEvent('finishUpload');
  }
});

Running tests

• ember test – Runs the test suite on the current Ember version
• ember test --server – Runs the test suite in "watch mode"
• ember try:each – Runs the test suite against multiple Ember versions

Running the dummy application

• ember serve
• Visit the dummy application at http://localhost:4200.

Thanks

• @catz for updating the addon to work with Ember 3.3+
• @hhff for the continued support and feedback
• @joliss for all her hard work on broccoli
• @rpflorence for all of his work on broccoli-dist-es6-module
• @obrie for the Ruby state_machine gem, which was my first introduction to state machines
• @tildeio & crew for RSVP and Ember
• My coworkers and friends @elucid @ghedamat @drteeth @minusfive for reviewing and fiddling with the stuff I make
• Unspace for understanding open source and caring about open source
• @ssured for adding the ability to define callbacks as inline functions