EventAggregator.NET

An in-memory publish-subscribe messaging pattern used for inter-component communication.

Usage

Similar to a message queue which decouples application boundaries, the EventAggregator decuples component/service boundaries within an application. This pattern is particularly useful when there is a need to decouple components and facilitate communication between them without them being aware of each other's existence within the application.

This is particularly useful for desktop UI applications where parts of the UI need to update/respond to events happening in another part of the application.

Another particularly useful scenario is when application services need to communicate with each other. In this scenario services will either respond to each other's events (which may cause memory leaks if the event subscriptions are not properly managed) or call each other's methods by means of composition.

In other words Service A will contain a reference to Service B and vice versa so they can either subscribe to each other's events or call each other's methods. In either cases we may run into memory leaks because the services will hang on to each other and depending on their lifetimes - may never get disposed. Nevermind the issue of composing their object graphs.

So the Event Aggregator helps facilitate that inter-component communication and decoupling of such, without introducing memory leaks. This is because the underlying mechanism of the event subscription uses reflection and WeakReferences to keep track of subscribers that may or may not have been disposed.

Event / Message Publisher

A publisher needs to get a reference to the event aggregator in order to be able to publish messages through it.

Event / Message Consumer

A consumer needs to implement IEventSubscriber<T> where T represents the type of message it is listening for. The IEventSubscriber<T> interface forces a subscriber to implement a message handler when the message is received. The method signature of the handler takes in a single parameter of type T (where T represents the message type):

public void OnAggregateEvent(T message)

Multiple subscriptions for different messages are possible as each implementation of the OnAggregateEvent(T message) message handler become overloads of each other.

Example - Message Definitions

Messages can be any POCO/CLR/DTO (or whatever you want to call them) objects. Keep in mind that messages are not immutable and are passed by reference. That means if a handler modifies it, the next handler that receives it will see the modified changes and not necessary the original message.

 
 /// <summary>
 /// Represents the message being published or listened for 
 /// </summary>
 public class MessageType1 {
    ...
 }
 
 /// <summary>
 /// Represents the message being published or listened for 
 /// </summary>
 public class MessageType2 { 
    ...
 }
 

Example - Event/Message Publisher

A publisher simply needs to call the Publish(T message) method of the event aggregator to send an event/message to listening consumers. So long as the consumers implement the IEventSubscriber<T> interface for the message type they should be able to receive the message.

 /// <summary>
 /// Represents a single publisher.
 /// </summary>
 public class Publisher1 {
 
    private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator;
    
    /// <summary>
    /// A constructor for an event publisher that takes an IEventAggregator as a dependency...
    /// </summary>
    public Publisher1(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) {
    
      if(eventAggregator == null) {
        throw new ArgumentNullException(paramName: nameof(eventAggregator), message: "The event aggregator is required.");
      }
    
      this.eventAggregator = eventAggregator;
    }
    
    /// <summary>
    /// Publishes an event/message to listening consumers.
    /// </summary>
    public void PublishMessageType1() {
    
      this.eventAggregator.Publish(new MessageType1());
    
    }
 }
 
 /// <summary>
 /// Represents another publisher.
 /// </summary>
 public class Publisher2 {
 
    private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator;
    
    /// <summary>
    /// A constructor for an event publisher that takes an IEventAggregator as a dependency...
    /// </summary>
    public Publisher1(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) {
    
      if(eventAggregator == null) {
        throw new ArgumentNullException(paramName: nameof(eventAggregator), message: "The event aggregator is required.");
      }
    
      this.eventAggregator = eventAggregator;
    }
    
    /// <summary>
    /// Publishes an event/message to listening consumers.
    /// </summary>
    public void PublishMessageType2() {
    
      this.eventAggregator.Publish(new MessageType2());
    
    }
 }
 

Example - Event/Message Subscriber

A subscriber needs to implement an IEventSubscriber<T> interface for the message type they want to listen to. In this example the subscriber listens to messages from both publishers defined above.

 /// <summary>
 /// Represents a subscriber that listens to message types from both publishers.
 /// </summary>
 public class Subscriber : IEventSubscriber<MessageType1>, IEventSubscriber<MessageType2> {
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Event handler executed when a message/event of type MessageType1 is received.
    /// </summary>
    public void OnAggregateEvent(MessageType1 message) {
      ...
    }
 
 
    /// <summary>
    /// Event handler executed when a message/event of type MessageType2 is received.
    /// </summary>
    public void OnAggregateEvent(MessageType2 message) {
      ...
    }
 }