Rx-IPC-Electron

Easily pass RxJS Observables between the main and renderer processes of your Electron app!

This is a friendly fork of https://github.com/colinskow/rx-ipc-electron by Colin Skow, since that package seems abandoned. This fork started to just update the dependencies, in order to make it usable with hewer sofrware, but since then it has gone under refactor and improvement.

Why

Observables are probably the simplest way to coordinate asynchronous events and pass data between the main and renderer processes in an Electron app.

This module makes it easy. Simply create a factory function which returns any Observable or Subject and register a listener. Then run the command from another process in your app and the returned observable will pass through.

Setup

npm install --save @open-kappa/rx-ipc-electron

From the Electron MAIN process

import rxIpc from '@open-kappa/rx-ipc-electron/dist/rx-ipc-electron/main';
// const rxIpc = require('@open-kappa/rx-ipc-electron/dist/rx-ipc-electron/main');

From the Electron RENDERER process

import rxIpc from '@open-kappa/rx-ipc-electron/dist/rx-ipc-electron/renderer';
// const rxIpc = require('@open-kappa/rx-ipc-electron/dist/rx-ipc-electron/renderer');

Quick Start

MAIN

// This is a factory function that returns an Observable
function createObservable(...args) {
  return Observable.from(args)
    .map(x => x * 2);
}
rxIpc.registerListener('create-observable', createObservable);

RENDERER

const results = [];
// null to target the main process, otherwise a `webContents`
// object from the window you want to target
rxIpc.runCommand('create-observable', null, 1, 2, 3)
  .subscribe(
    (data) => {
      results.push(data);
    },
    (err) => {
      console.error(err);
    },
    () => {
      console.log(results);
      // Logs [2, 4, 6]
    }
  );

API

rxIpc.checkRemoteListener(channel, receiver)

Checks if a listener is active on the receiver for the channel you specify.

• channel (string) the name of the command you want to check.
• receiver (null or webContents) null if the main process is the target, otherwise the webContents object of the window you want to target (e.g. event.sender).

Returns: a Promise resolving to a boolean, true if the listner is active, otherwise false.

rxIpc.removeAllListeners()

Removes all active command listeners.

Returns: void

rxIpc.registerListener(channel, observableFactory)

Registers a new listener for the command you specify.

• channel (string) the name of the command you want to register.
• observableFactory (function) a function which can take any number of arguments (passed through from rxIpc.runCommand) and returns an Observable.

Returns: void.

rxIpc.removeListeners(channel)

Removes all listeners for the channel you specify.

• channel (string) the name of the command for the listener you want to remove.

Returns: void.

rxIpc.runCommand(channel, receiver, ...args)

Runs the command you specify on the remote receiver.

• channel (string) the name of the registered command you want to run.
• receiver (null or webContents) null if the main process is the target, otherwise the webContents object of the window you want to target.
• ...args any number of arguments to be passed to the remote Observable factory function.

Returns: an Observable passed through from the remote Observable.