Events and Subscriptions

Note: Spartacus 3.x is no longer maintained. Please upgrade to the latest version.

Note: Spartacus 3.x was tested with SAP Commerce Cloud versions 1905 to 2105. Spartacus 3.x has not been verified to work with (and is not guaranteed to work with) SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 or later releases.

In Spartacus, at the application start, you can subscribe to event streams that continue to be active for the whole application lifetime.

When working with these kinds of event streams, it is important to subscribe only to the ones you need at the time, and nothing else. This is because streams can often cause side effects, such as loading data. Subscribing needlessly to streams can cause redundant calls, and add extra computations that result in reduced application performance.

In the following example, use of the withLatestFrom operator results in subscriptions to the passed stream (that is, to the parameter you use to call the withLatestFrom function) when the root stream is subscribed to:

this.getAction(mapping.action).pipe(
  withLatestFrom(this.activeCartService.getActive()),
  map(([action, activeCart]) =>
    createFrom(mapping.event, {
      ...action.payload,
      cartCode: activeCart.code,
    })
  )
);

The intention in this example is to enrich cart actions with the contents of the cart. However, once a listener has been registered to the cart events, using the withLatestFrom operator results in a subscription to the active cart, which then invokes a cart load. But in fact, we only want cart data when a cart event happens.

We can adjust the event stream, as shown in the following example:

this.getAction(mapping.action).pipe(
  switchMap((action) => {
    return of(action).pipe(
      withLatestFrom(
        this.activeCartService.getActive(),
        this.activeCartService.getActiveCartId()
      )
    );
  }),
  map(([action, activeCart]) =>
    createFrom(mapping.event, {
      ...action.payload,
      cartCode: activeCart.code,
    })
  )
);

In this example, we no longer subscribe to the cart stream when someone subscribes to the output stream (that is, when the application starts). Instead, we only subscribe when the source event occurs.