suggestion for return value if published via publishSync about pubsubjs

[mroderick]

I am not entirely sure I understand what you're suggesting.

Could you write a code example of how you would like to use it?

[Ognian]

lets say we have to subscribers
var f1 = PubSub.subscribe("level1", function (msg, data) {
...//do soemthing
return true;
});
var f2 = PubSub.subscribe("level1.level2", function (msg, data) {
...//do soemthing
return true;
});
calling
var r = PubSub.publishSync("level1.level2");
shall make r be true
changing f1 to return false should make r be false and shall avoid calling f2
In that case the call chain of the subscribers is from the most general one to the most concrete one ...
If the 2 subscribers would be both on the same level than the order does not matter, but as soon as one fails (return false) the others would not be called...
Does this help?
Ognian

[mroderick]

Thank you for elaborating.

Your proposal would move PubSubJS very much closer to traditional, tightly coupled event handling systems (Observer pattern) and away from the ideal of decoupled publishers and subscribers (Mediator pattern).

Currently, there is no contract of order of message delivery and no synchronisation coupling (messages are delivered asynchronously), which promotes loose coupling. This is awesome, but not necessarily appropriate for every situation.

Perhaps what you really need is the Observer pattern?

Addy Osmany has a great article about the Observer pattern, with a subsection about the differences between Observer and Publish/Subscribe.

For more details about Publish/Subscribe, I recommend The Many Faces of Publish/Subscribe.

Currently, PubSubJS at least manages to do synchronisation decoupling, I'd like it to stay that way.

As always, there is the fork button :-)