eipfork

Eipfork - async messaging for electron

Eipfork is fork of Eiphop rewritten in typescript.

Installation

npm i eipfork
# or
yarn add eipfork

Getting started

Actions are defined in main process and called from renderer with async response.

Define actions

Imagine you have the following actions in your main process:

const pingActions = {
  ping: (req, res) => {
    const { payload } = req;
    res.send({ msg: 'pong' });
  },
};

const hipActions = {
  hip: async (req, res) => {
    const { payload } = req;
    res.notify('Sleeping for 800ms, BRB');
    // sleep for 800ms
    await new Promise((done) => setTimeout(done, 800));
    res.send({ msg: 'hop' });

    // or res.error({msg: 'failed'})
  },
};

Setup main handler

Actions from different domain objects need to be combined to one global map and passed to eiphop's setupMainHandler function.

import { setupMainHandler } from 'eiphop';
import electron from 'electron';

setupMainHandler({ ...hipActions, ...pingActions });

Setup Renderer Listener

In your renderer’s index.js file, setup the listener as follows:

import { setupFrontendListener } from 'eiphop';

setupFrontendListener();

Now your channels are ready. All you need to do is trigger actions.

Emit actions and expect response

Use the emit function to call actions defined in the main action map.

import { emit } from 'eiphop';

emit('ping', { you: 'can', pass: 'data', to: 'main' }, (msg) => {
  console.log(msg);
})
  .then((res) => console.log(res)) // will log {msg: 'pong'}
  .catch((err) => console.log(err));

emit('hip', { empty: 'payload' }, (msg) => {
  console.log(msg);
})
  .then((res) => console.log(res)) // will log {msg: 'hop'}
  .catch((err) => console.log(err));

emit takes up to three arguments:

• The name of the action to call (this was defined is actions map in main)
• The payload to send (this can be an object, string, list etc)
• [Optional] A callback function called by the main process to notify the render process with a message.

Using Notifiers

For example, sometimes there is a long running operation on the main process and you may want to provide the render process with an update as to it's progress.

You can use notifiers to send a message to the emiter on the render process by using res.notify without resolving the promise.

import { emit } from 'eiphop';

emit(
  'download',
  {
    /* fileIds, etc */
  },
  (msg) => {
    console.log(msg);
  }
)
  .then((res) => console.log(res)) // will contain the downloaded file
  .catch((err) => console.log(err));

// Main process
const pingActions = {
  ping: (req, res) => {
    const { payload } = req;

    payload.filesToDownload.forEach((fileId) => {
      // Tell the render process what is happening so it can inform the user
      res.notify(`Downloading file ${fileId}`);
      downloadFile(payload.fileId);
    });

    res.send({ msg: 'pong' });
  },
};