Events

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Events
  3. Listeners
  4. Dispatchers
  5. Configuration

Introduction

There might be times in your application that you need to immediately notify certain components that an event took place. For example, if you have "hooks" that execute before and after an action, you will need a way for components to subscribe to those hooks. This is a great use case of events in Opulence. An event dispatcher holds a list of listeners for each type of event. Whenever an event is fired, the dispatcher notifies all the listeners.

Events

An event object holds data about the event, which can be used by any listeners handling the event. Can be any plain-old PHP object. Let's take a look at an example event to be fired when a user registers:

namespace MyApp\Events;

use MyApp\Users\User;

class NewUserEvent
{
    private $user;

    public function __construct(User $user)
    {
        $this->user = $user;
    }

    public function getUser() : User
    {
        return $this->user;
    }
}

We'll use this event in the examples below.

Listeners

A listener is what handles an event. Listeners must be callables. They are passed the event object, the name of the event fired, and the event Dispatcher. Let's take a look at some example listeners for our NewUserEvent:

Listener Closure

You can use a closure for your listener:

use MyApp\Events\NewUserEvent;
use MyApp\Users\User;
use Opulence\Events\Dispatchers\IEventDispatcher;

$listener = function (NewUserEvent $event, $eventName, IEventDispatcher $dispatcher) {
    mail($event->getUser()->getEmail(), 'Welcome', 'Welcome to my website!');
};
Listener Class

You can also use a class for your listener:

namespace MyApp\Events\Listeners;

use MyApp\Events\NewUserEvent;
use MyApp\Users\User;
use Opulence\Events\Dispatchers\IEventDispatcher;

class RegistrationEmail
{
    public function handle(NewUserEvent $event, string $eventName, IEventDispatcher $dispatcher)
    {
        mail($event->getUser()->getEmail(), 'Welcome', 'Welcome to my website!');
    }
}

Note: Listener methods can be named whatever you'd like.

Dispatchers

The dispatches events to the registered listeners. Let's add the listener example to the event example:

use Opulence\Events\Dispatchers\EventRegistry;
use Opulence\Events\Dispatchers\SynchronousEventDispatcher;

$registry = new EventRegistry();
$registry->registerListener('user.registered', [new RegistrationEmail(), 'handle']);
$dispatcher = new SynchronousEventDispatcher($registry);

Note: Event names can be whatever you want. In this case, we made it as descriptive as possible: user.registered.

To actually fire an event, call the dispatch() method:

use MyApp\Users\User;

$user = new User('Dave', 'foo@bar.com');

// Register the user...

$dispatcher->dispatch('user.registered', new NewUserEvent($user));

The dispatcher will loop through and call all listeners registered for the user.registered event. In this case, RegistrationEmail::handle() will be called, and the user will receive a welcome email.

Configuration

If you're using the skeleton project, you'll see a config array in config/events.php. The array accepts event names to an array of listeners. A listener can be any one of the following: