ActionExecutor

The action executor is capable of coordinating the execution of multiple asynchronous actions. In situations where you do latency compensation you have a high risk of race conditions. To avoid the race conditions you can use locking to serialize execution of actions that touches shared state a cross actions. You decide the granularity of the locking, the action executor provides you with a way to signal that an action can't be started because it can get the proper locks.

In addition to handling coordination, the action executor also supply retrying with exponential backoff and action life cycle hooks.

Installation

Node

Install it with NPM or add it to your package.json:

$ npm install action-executor

Then:

var ActionExecutor = require('action-executor');

Browser

Include ActionNotReadyError and ActionExecutor.js.

<script src="ActionNotReadyError.js"></script>
<script src="ActionExecutor.js"></script>

this will expose the ActionExecutor constructor under the following namespace:

var ActionExecutor = com.one.ActionExecutor;

RequireJS

Include the library with RequireJS the following way:

require.config({
    paths: {
        ActionExecutor: 'path/to/action-executor/lib/ActionExecutor.js'
    }
});
 
define(['ActionExecutor'], function (ActionExecutor) {
   // Your code
});

Proposed architecture

You are of cause free to build the architecture you like on top of the action executor, but the architecture we use and recommend is unidirectional and therefore makes the application easier to understand. The following diagram shows the flow through the application.

    .--------state change triggers view update------.
    |                                               |
    v    ___________              __________        |
.------. \          \  .--------. \         \   .-------.
| View |  ) executes ) | Action |  ) Updates )  | State |
'------' /__________/  '--------' /_________/   '-------'
                            |
                          Calls
                            |
                            v
                       .---------.
                       | Backend |
                       '---------'

Example

The application of the action executor is best explained by an example.

Let's start by creating a new action executor:

var actionExecutor = new ActionExecutor({
    context: {
       backend: backend,
       state: state
    }
});

The given context is supplied to the action when it is being executed. In this case the actions will be able to talk to the backend and update the application state that in turn will be reflected back to the views.

Let's say we have an application state that contains a list of persons that we want to update. We can make a new action for that:

function RefreshPersonListAction() {}
RefreshPersonListAction.prototype.name = 'RefreshPersonListAction';
RefreshPersonListAction.prototype.execute(function (context, cb) {
    var persons = context.state.persons;
    var backend = context.backend;
 
    backend.loadPersonList(function (err, data) {
        if (!err) {
            persons.all = data.persons;
            persons.emit('updated');
        }
        cb(err);
    });
});

This action can be queue for execution by the action executor the following way.

actionExecutor.enqueue(new RefreshPersonListAction());

You can supply a callback as the second parameter if you need a callback when the action in done:

actionExecutor.enqueue(new RefreshPersonListAction(), function (err, data) {
    // The action has been executed and succeed or failed.
});

Locking

If we want to introduce another action that will be able to delete a given person, but we don't want to wait for the server to respond before updating the person list, then we have a coordination problem. To solve this problem we introduce a lock on the persons list. We need to handle locking in all actions that updates the person list. If the action can't get the lock, should yield an ActionNotReadyError, this will make the action wait in the queue till another action has finished, then it will be retried. For this to work, one very important invariant has to be in place - an action that take a lock must always release it again when it succeeded or failed - otherwise actions will get stuck in the queue.

Let's start with the RefreshPersonListAction:

function RefreshPersonListAction() {}
RefreshPersonListAction.prototype.name = 'RefreshPersonListAction';
RefreshPersonListAction.prototype.execute(function (context, cb) {
    var persons = context.state.persons;
    var backend = context.backend;
 
    if (persons.locked) {
        return cb(new ActionNotReadyError());
    }
 
    persons.locked = true;
    backend.loadPersonList(function (err, data) {
        persons.locked = false;
        if (!err) {
            persons.all = data.persons;
            persons.emit('updated');
        }
        cb(err);
    });
});

Now we introduce the DeletePersonAction:

function DeletePersonAction(options) {
    this.person = options.person;
}
DeletePersonAction.prototype.name = 'DeletePersonAction';
DeletePersonAction.prototype.execute(function (context, cb) {
    var state = context.state;
    var backend = context.backend;
    var persons = state.persons;
    var person = this.person;
 
    if (persons.locked) {
       return cb(new ActionNotReadyError());
    }
 
    persons.locked = true;
 
    var index = persons.indexOf(person);
    if (index === -1) {
        return cb();
    }
 
    persons.all.splice(index, 1);
    persons.emit('updated');
    backend.deletePerson(person.id, function (err, data) {
        state.persons.locked = false;
        cb(err);
    });
});

If we enqueue both a RefreshPersonListAction and a DeletePersonAction at the same time. The execution will be serialized on the person list. That means the DeletePersonAction will wait for the RefreshPersonListAction to finish.

Retrying

As the RefreshPersonListAction just uses HTTP GET it should be idempotent and can therefore be retried. We can configure the action executor to retry on HTTP 503 errors the following way:

actionExecutor.shouldRetryOnError = function (err) {
   return err.status === 503;
};

Then to enable 3 retries for the RefreshPersonListAction you do the following:

RefreshPersonListAction.prototype.retries = 3;

Intercepting actions

In some cases you want to intercept execution of actions. It could be for logging or because you wanted to tag error instances for error routing.

Here is an example where we are tagging the errors yielded by the action with the action name using Failboat:

actionExecutor.interceptor = function (action, args, next) {
    var err = args[0];
    if (err) {
        Failboat.tag(err, action.name);
    }
    next();
};

Notice: that the interceptor runs after the action has been executed and receives the arguments yielded to the callback by the action.

interceptor can also be specified in the constructor.

Action status change events

Let's say we wanted to log the status of the actions being executed. We can do that by overriding the onStatusChange method on the action executor:

actionExecutor.onStatusChange = function (task, status, err) {
    var errorMessage = err && err.message && ', error: ' + err.message;
    console.log(task.action.name + ' ' + status + errorMessage || ''));
};

You will get something like the following log output:

DeletePersonAction running
RefreshFoldersAction running
RefreshFoldersAction not ready
DeletePersonAction done
RefreshFoldersAction running
RefreshFoldersAction queued for retrying, error: 503 service unavailable
RefreshFoldersAction retrying
RefreshFoldersAction running
RefreshFoldersAction done

onStatusChange can also be specified in the constructor.

Empty action queue event

In some situations it makes sense to do some stuff when the action executor is idle. If you need that you can listen for the empty queue event the following way:

actionExecutor.onEmptyQueue = function () {
    // do some stuff
}

onEmptyQueue can also be specified in the constructor.

License

Copyright © 2014, One.com

ActionExecutor is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, as given at http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause