Orbital Frame

Workflow framework to automate and simplify your life

v0.0.1 - Ardjet / Pre-Release - NOT SUITABLE FOR PRODUCTION

Introduction

Orbital Frame is a workflow framework designed to work similar to Zapier or IFTTT. It works with the concept of event, pipe, and context.

A simple workflow for a time bot:

const frame = new OrbitalFrame();
const expPlugin = new ExpressPlugin();
frame.with(expPlugin)

// Whenever a slack outgoing webhook is received
frame.on(new SlackEvent())
    // Pipe is a middleware, it processes the event and
    // decides whether it want to continue or not    
    .pipe(
        // A prebuilt pipe can be used by mapping the input to
        // it own expected format and pipe it out
        new WitAiPipe({
            client
        }).map(context => {
            return {
                message: SlackEvent.data(context).data.text
            }
        }).pipe()
    )
    .pipe((context, event, next) => {
        const witData = WitAiPipe.data(context)
        const eventData = SlackEvent.data(context);        
        if (witData.intents[0].name === 'ask_time' && witData.intents[0].confidence > 0.7) {
            eventData.res.status(200).send({
                text: `Its ${new Date().toTimeString()} now`
            }).end()
        }       
    })

frame.start();

Concepts

Event

Event is the entry point of a workflow, when an event occurs, it will run any registered flow.

Even must inherits from OrbitalEvent, implements the get symbol, setup, and also expose the constructor that accept options.

Best practice, it is not required but highly recommended to implement a static method to read a context using its symbol. E.g SlackEvent.data(context) will returns the data stored by SlackEvent in the context.

Pipe

Pipe is a middleware function that accepts context, events, next pipe, and the frame. Most of the time you'd likely be interested with the first three only.

Pipe must implements the pipe() method that returns the actual pipe that's going to be run. A pipe accepts a mapper function, which is used to map current context into a form that could be understood by the pipe.

Context

Context is the storage of the flow, any event, pipes, and plugins; can store data into the context.

To prevent collision, context must be indexed with symbol only. That is why event, pipes, and plugins should always expose the symbol it used to store the data so it can be fetched later.