The Event Store for Rails developers

We have experimented for some time with an Event Sourcing in our projects. This is why we released a free HTTP connector to the Greg’s Event Store written in Ruby. On the basis of earlier experiences from the one of our projects we decided to create own implementation of an Event Store. I would like to announce the first release of the Rails Event Store gem.

Usage

If you already have the rails_event_store gem in your Gemfile then you have to create a table in your database. To do this you have to run the provided task. This will generate an activerecord migration.

rails generate rails_event_store:migrate
rake db:migrate

To use our gem’s functionality you have to create an instance of RailsEventStore::Client class.



client = RailsEventStore::Client.new

Creating events

Creating events is very simple. At the beginning you have to define your own event model extending RailsEventStore::Event class.

class ProductAdded < RailsEventStore::Event

end

Now you are prepared to create event’s instance and save it to a database.

stream_name = "product_1"

event_data = {data: { name: "Test Product" }}
event = ProductAdded.new(event_data)
#publishing event for specific stream
client.publish_event(event, stream_name)
#publishing global event with stream_name == 'all'
client.publish_event(event)

We use the concept of streams like in Greg’s Event Store but (as you can see in the above example) you are able to create a global event. The event_id is also an optional value. If you leave it blank then the application generate UUID for you. The rails_event_store provide also optimistic concurrency control. You can define an expected version of stream during creating event. In this case the last event identifier.

stream_name = "product_1"

event_data = {

    data: { name: "Test Product" },

    event_id: "b2d506fd-409d-4ec7-b02f-c6d2295c7edd"

}

event = ProductAdded.new(event_data)

expected_version = "850c347f-423a-4158-a5ce-b885396c5b73"

client.publish_event(event, stream_name, expected_version)

Reading events

You can fetch events from database in a several ways. In any case, loaded events are sorted ascending.

• Reading event’s batch:

stream_name = "product_1"

start_event = "b2d506fd-409d-4ec7-b02f-c6d2295c7edd"
count = 40
client.read_all_events(stream_name, start_event, count)

• Reading all stream’s events:

stream_name = "product_1"

client.read_all_events(stream_name)

• Reading all events:

client.read_all_streams

Deleting stream

You can permanently delete all events from a specific stream. Use this wisely.

stream_name = "product_1"
client.delete_stream(stream_name)

Subscription mechanism

Using our library you can synchronously listen on specific events. The only requirement is that the subscriber class has to implement the ‘handle_event(event)’ method. Check out the following example.

class InvoiceReadModel
    def handle_event(event)
        if event.event_type == 'ProductAdded'
            create_new_product(event.data)
        end
        if event.event_type == 'ProductUpdated'
            update_product(event.data)
        end
    end
    private
    def create_new_product(event_data)
        #Implementation here
    end
    def update_product(event_data)
        #Implementation here
    end

end


invoice = InvoiceReadModel.new
client.subscribe(invoice, ['ProductUpdated', 'ProductAdded'])