Gearbox

Gearbox is a functional state machine with an easy-to-use API, inspired by both Fsm and Machinery.

Gearbox does not run in a process, so there's no potential for a GenServer bottleneck. This way there's also less overhead as you won't need to setup a supervision tree/manage your state machine processes.

Note: Gearbox is heavily inspired by Machinery, and also took inspiration from Fsm.

Gearbox is very similar to Machinery in term of the API usage, however it differs in the ways below:

• Gearbox does not use a GenServer as a backing process. Since GenServer can be a potential bottleneck in a system, for that reason I think it's best to leave process management to users of the library.
• before_transition/3 and after_transition/3 exposes the current_state and also next_state, providing more options when defining callbacks.
• Gearbox does not ship with a Phoenix Dashboard view. A really cool and great concept, but more often than not it is not needed and the added dependency can prove more trouble than worth.

For a more detailed documentation, checkout the HexDoc - https://hexdocs.pm/gearbox.

Installation

Get the latest version from Hex

def deps do
  [
    {:gearbox, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Rationale

Gearbox operates on the philosophy that it acts purely as a functional state machine, wherein it does not care where your state is store (e.g: Ecto, GenServer), all Gearbox does is to help you ensure state transitions happen the way you expect it to.

In most cases like for example Order, it is very likely that you don't need a process for that. Just get the record out of the database, run it through Gearbox machine, then persist it back to database.

In some rare cases where you need to have a stateful state machine, for example a traffic light that has an internal timer to shift from red (30s) -> green (30s) -> yellow (5s) -> red, you are better off to use an Agent/GenServer where you have better control over backpressuring/ business logics.

As of now, Gearbox does not provide a way to create events/actions in a state machine. This is because Gearbox is not a domain/context wrapper, I feel events/actions that can trigger a state change should reside closer to your contexts, therefore I urge users to group these events as domain events (contexts), rather than state machine events.

Features

Below lists a couple of features that Gearbox currently have.

State Transitions

The core of Gearbox. Allows you to transition a state from one to another (managed by your own machine).

defmodule Commerce do
  def pay(user, order) do
    # ...
    # Your payment logic
    {:ok, updated_order} = Gearbox.transition(order, PaymentMachine, "paid")
    # ...
  end
end

There's also a bang! variant of transition, Gearbox.transition!/3, so you can rewrite your code to like so:

defmodule Commerce do
  def pay(user, order) do
    # ...
    # Your payment logic
    order
    |> Gearbox.transition!(PaymentMachine, "paid")
    |> Repo.insert!
  end
end

Callbacks (Before & After)

Callbacks provide you hooks to execute before and after a transition happens/happened.

• before_transition/3
• after_transition/3

Note that callbacks should always return struct, and callbacks will only be run if transition is valid.

Guard Transitions

Guard transitions enforces a condition to be passed before a transitions is committed.

A transition is halted if the function returns {:halt, reason}, it continues otherwise. It will then return {:error, reason} for Gearbox.transition/3

# You can match on both `from` and `to` states.
def guard_transition(struct, _from, _to) do
  case :rand.uniform() do
    val when val >= 0.5 ->
      # You can return anything
    _ ->
      {:halt, "You have been snapped."}
  end
end

Note that guard transitions will only be run if transition is valid.

Contributions

Contributions are very welcomed, but please first open an issue so we can align and discuss before any development begins.

License

View License