Let's learn these things together.
The stream learning curve has been (embarrassingly) difficult for me. But I find that the more I talk about how confused I am, the more I find people are confused, too. I've received some great help along the way, and I want to share what I've found while I continue to learn more.
When you get stuck, keep in mind:
- The answer is almost always in the modules. The hard part is finding them and knowing what to use when
- Your use case can probably be "re-thought of" and applied to an existing solution for a similar problem
- You can come here to ask for help, and I'll try my best to answer or get one
If you find any of this information to be inaccurate or incomplete, feel free to contribute a PR!
Problem
You need to pull down many results from a backend, but it limits the amount of responses you receive at a given time. You get some type of token to include with a follow up request to cursor through the results. How do you combine all of those results into one stream?
Solutions
- https://github.com/feross/multistream
- https://github.com/timhudson/continue-stream
- https://github.com/timhudson/pagination-stream
Problem
You have a bunch of streams piped together and one gets an error. The other streams and any listeners on them don't really know what happened and linger around without being properly destroyed.
Solutions
Problem
You have a source readable stream but don't really want to do anything stream-y with it. Registering .on('data') events is a lot of boilerplate to combine the results as they come in.
Solution
Problem
You want to make an API request but have to fetch an access token first. If you just call request(/*...*/), you will inevitably get a 401 error, so how do you get a stream, but only have it "start" after you fetch an access token?
Solution