go-statemachine

A generic state machine

Table of Contents

• Description
• Usage
• Interation With Statestore
• License

Description

The module provides tools for defining and tracking generic state machines. For a more specific implementation that specifically defines finite state machines, see the FSM module, that provides additional tools on top of the generic machines defined here

State machines:

• Receive Events
• Modify State
• Take further actions based on new state, possibly generating more events

Usage

A state machine is defined in terms of a Planner.

It has the following signature:

type Planner func(events []Event, user interface{}) (nextActions interface{}, eventsProcessed uint64, err error)

A planner receives a series of events and a pointer to the current state (represented by user)

The planner generally:

• processes one or more events that mutate state
• constructs a function that will perform additional actions based on the new state

It returns:

1. The next actions handler-- should have the signature func(ctx Context, st ) error), where is the typeOf(user) param
2. The number of events processed
3. An error if occured

As a general rule, you mutate inside the planner function, while you perform side effects outside the planner in the return handler, which only receives a value for state and cannot mutate it (but can dispatch more events).

Interaction with statestore

The go-statemachine is designed to be used with a list of data structures, persisted to a datastore through the go-statestore module. When working with statemachines this way, you define a StateHandler with a Plan function that works like a Planner.

You initialize a new set of statemachines for a given type of state as follows:

var ds datastore.Batching
var stateHandler StateHandler

var stateMachines = statemachine.New(ds, stateHandler, StateType{})

This creates a machine for the given data store that will process data of type StateType with the given stateHandler.

You can now dispatch events to a state machine with:

var id interface{} // some identifier of a tracked state
var evt Event // some event type
stateMachines.Send(id, evt)

The state machine group will initialize a new statemachine if it is not already tracking data for the given identifier

License

Dual-licensed under MIT + Apache 2.0