pipedreams1 v0.1.7

• PipeDreams - Highlights - P.remit - The Problem - The Solution - Motivation - Overview

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PipeDreams

Common operations for piped NodeJS streams.

npm install --save pipedreams

Caveat Below examples are all written in CoffeeScript.

Highlights

P.remit

PipeDreams' remit method is my personal favorite to define pipe transformations. With P.remit you can

• reject unwanted data items in the stream;
• replace or modify data items;
• add new data items;
• send errors;
• optionally, determine the end of the stream (at the time when you are looking at the last data item in the stream).

The versatility and easy of use make remit a good replacement for both the map and the through methods of event-stream. Let's have a look at some examples to demonstrate both points.

The Problem

PipeDreams is a library that is built on top of Dominic Tarr's great event-stream, which is "a toolkit to make creating and working with streams easy".

Having worked a bit with ES and pipes, i soon found out that the dichotomy that exists in event-stream (ES) between ES.map ( data, handler ) -> ... and ES.through on_data, on_end is causing a lot of source code refactorings for me. This is because they work in fundamentally different ways.

Let's say you want a data tranformer and define, like,

@$transform = ->
  ### NB the fat arrow implicitly aliases `this` a.k.a. `@`
  so we still refer to the module or class inside the function ###
  return ES.map ( data, handler ) =>
    return handler new Error "can't handle empty string" if data is ''
    data = @do_some_fancy_stuff data
    handler null, data

input
  .pipe $transform()
  ...

Later on, you discover you'd rather count empty data strings and, when the stream is done, emit a single error that tells the user how many illegal data items were found (with lengthy streams it can indeed be very handy to offer a summary of issues rather than to just stop processing at the very first one).

To achieve this goal, you could go and define a module-level counter and another method that you tack to input.on 'end'. It's much cleaner though to have the counter encapsulated and stay with a single method in the pipe. ES.through let's you do that, but the above code does need some refactoring. To wit:

@$transform = ->
  ### we need an alias because `this` a.k.a `@`
  is not *this* 'this' inside `on_data`... ###
  do_some_fancy_stuff = @do_some_fancy_stuff.bind @
  count               = 0
  #..........................................................................................
  on_data = ( data ) ->
    if data is ''
      count += 1
      return
    data = do_some_fancy_stuff data
    @emit 'data', data
  #..........................................................................................
  on_end = ->
    @emit 'error', new Error "encountered #{count} illegal empty data strings" if count > 0
    @emit 'end'
  #..........................................................................................
  return ES.through on_data, on_end

input
  .pipe $transform()
  ...

The differences are plenty:

• we now have two functions instead of one;
• we have to rewrite ES.map X as ES.through Y, Z;
• there is no more handler (a.k.a. callback);
• we have to call @emit and specify the event type (data, error, or end);
• this has been re-bound by ES.through, much to my chagrin.

The refactored code works, but after the n th time switching between callback-based and event-based methodologies i became weary of this and set out to write one meta-method to rule them all: PipeDream's remit.

The Solution

Continuing with the above example, this is what our transformer looks like with 'immediate' error reporting:

@$transform = ->
  return P.remit ( data, send ) =>
    return send.error new Error "can't handle empty string" if data is ''
    data = @do_some_fancy_stuff data
    send data

input
  .pipe $transform()
  ...

Now that's snappy. remit expects a method with two or three arguments; in this case, it's got a method with two arguments, where the first one represents the current data that is being piped, and the second one is specifically there to send data or (with send.error) errors. Quite neat.

Now one interesting thing about send is that it can be called an arbitrary number of times, which lifts another limitation of doing it with ES.map ( data, handler ) -> ... where only a single call to handler is legal. If we wanted to, we could do

@$transform = ->
  return P.remit ( data, send ) =>
    return send.error new Error "can't handle empty string" if data is ''
    send @do_some_fancy_stuff   data
    send @do_other_fancy_stuff  data

to make several data items out of a single one. If you wanted to silently drop a piece of data, just don't call send—there's no need to make an 'empty' call to handler() as you'd have to with ES.map.

We promised easier code refactorings, and PipeDreams remit delivers. Here's the on-input-end sensitive version:

@$transform = ->
  count = 0
  return P.remit ( data, send, end ) =>
    return count += 1 if data is ''
    data = @do_some_fancy_stuff data
    send data
    if end?
      send.error 'error', new Error "encountered #{count} illegal empty data strings" if count > 0
      end()

input
  .pipe $transform()
  ...

The changes are subtle, quickly done, and do not affect the processing model:

• add a third argument end to your transformer function;
• check for end? (JavaScript: end != null) to know whether the end of the stream has been reached;
• make sure you actually do call end() when you're done.

You can still send as many data items as you like upon receiving end. Also note that, behind the scenes, PipeDreams buffers the most recent data item, so you will receive the very last item in the stream together with a non-empty end argument. This is good because you can then do your data processing upfront and the end event handling in the rear part of your code.

Caveat 1: There's one thing to watch out for: if the stream is completely empty, data will be null on the first call. This may become a problem if you're like me and like to use CoffeeScript's destructuring assignments, viz.:

@$transform = ->
  count = 0
  return P.remit ( [ line_nr, name, street, city, phone, ], send, end ) =>
    ...

I will possibly address this by passing a special empty object singleton as data that will cause structured assingment-signatures as this one to fail silently; you'd still be obliged to check whether your arguments have values other than undefined. In the meantime, if you suspect a stream could be empty, just use

@$transform = ->
  count = 0
  return P.remit ( data, send, end ) =>
    if data?
      [ line_nr, name, street, city, phone, ] = data
      ... process data ...
    if end?
      ... finalize ...

and you should be fine.

Caveat 2: Can you spot what's wrong with this code?:

@$count_good_beans_toss_bad_ones = ->
  good_bean_count = 0
  return P.remit ( bean, send, end ) =>
    return if bean isnt 'good'
    good_bean_count += 1
    send bean
    if end?
      "we have #{good_bean_count} good beans!"
      end()

This source code has (almost) all of the features of an orderly written remit method, yet it will sometimes fail silently—but only if the very last bean is not a good one. The reason is the premature return statement which in that case prevents the if end? clause from ever being reached. Avoid premature return statements in remit methods. This code fixes the issue:

@$count_good_beans_toss_bad_ones = ->
  good_bean_count = 0
  return P.remit ( bean, send, end ) =>
    if bean is 'good'
      good_bean_count += 1
      send bean
    if end?
      "we have #{good_bean_count} good beans!"
      end()

Caveat 3: Always use end() with methods that issue asynchronous calls.

The short:

The reason: I believe when you issue an asynchronous call from an asynchronous method (or any other place in the code), then NodeJS should be smart enough to put a hold so those async calls can finish before the process terminates.

However, it would appear that the stream API's end events (or maybe those of event-stream) are lacking these smarts. The diagnostic is the odd last line that's missing from your final output. I always use PipeDreams' $show() method in the pipe to get a quick overview of what's going on; and, sure enough, when moving the .pipe P.$show() line from top to bottom in your pipe and repeating the streaming process, somewhere a stream transformer will show up that does take the final piece of data as input but is late to the game when it's ready to pass back the results.

The workaround is to use remit with three arguments ( data, send, end ); that way, you 'grab' the end token and put everything on hold 'manually', as it were. Think of it as the baton in a relay race: you don't hold the baton—anyone could have it and finish the race. You hold the baton—you may walk as slowly as you like, and the game won't be over until you cross the finish or pass the baton.

Update: this solution does not work. One possible solution may be to migrate to the incipient PipeDreams2.

Motivation

a stream is just a series of things over time. if you were to re-implement your library to use your own stream implementation, you'd end up with an 80% clone of NodeJS core streams (and get 20% wrong). so why not just use core streams?—paraphrased from Dominic Tarr, Nodebp April 2014: The History of Node.js Streams.

So i wanted to read those huge GTFS files for my nascent TimeTable project, and all went well except for those humongous files with millions and millions of lines.

I stumbled over the popular csv-parse package that is widely used by NodeJS projects, and, looking at the pipe interface, i found it very enticing and suitable, so i started using it.

Unfortunately, it so turned out that i kept loosing records from my data. Most blatantly, some data sets ended up containing a consistent number of 16384 records, although the affected sources contain many more and each one a different number of records. I've since found out that, alas, csv-parse has some issues related to stream backpressure not being handled correctly (see my question on StackOverflow and the related issue on GitHub).

More research revealed two things:

• NodeJS streams can be difficult to grasp. They're new, they're hot, they're much talked about but also somewhat underdocumented, and their API is just shy of being convoluted. Streams are so hard to get right the NodeJS team saw it fit to introduce a second major version in 0.10.x—although streams had been part of NodeJS from very early on.

• More than a few projects out there provide software that use a non-core (?) stream implementation as part of their project and expose the relevant methods in their API; csv-parse is one of those, and hence its problems. Having looked at a few projects, i started to suspect that this is wrong: CSV-parser-with-streams-included libraries are often very specific in what they allow you to do, and, hence, limited; moreover, there is a tendency for those stream-related methods to eclipse what a CSV parser, at its core, should be good at (parsing CSV).

  Have a look at the fast-csv API to see what i mean: you get a lot of fastcsv.createWriteStream, fastcsv.fromStream and so on methods. Thing is, you don't need that stuff to work with streams, and you don't need that stuff to parse CSV files, so those methods are simply superfluous.

A good modern NodeJS CSV parser should be compatible with streams, it should not replace or emulate NodeJS core streams—that is a violation of the principle of Separation of Concerns (SoC).

A nice side effect of this maxime is that the individual functions i write to handle and manipulate got simpler upon rejecting solutions that had all the batteries and the streams included in their supposedly convenient setups. It's a bit like when you want a new mat to sit on when driving: you'd probably prefer that standalone / small / cheap / focused offering over the one that includes all of the upholstering, as that would be quite a hassle to get integrated with your existing vehicle. It's maybe no accident that all the solutions i found on the websites promoting all-in-one solutions give a lot of snippets how you can turn their APIs inside-out from piping to event-based to making pancakes, but they never show you a real-world example that shows how to weave those solutions into a long pipeline of data transformations, which is what stream pipelines are there for and excel at.

Scroll down a bit to see a real-world example built with PipeDreams.

Overview

PipeDreams—as the name implies—is centered around the pipeline model of working with streams. A quick (CoffeeScript) example is in place:

P = require 'pipedreams'                                                  #  1
                                                                          #  2
@read_stop_times = ( registry, route, handler ) ->                        #  3
  input = P.create_readstream route, 'stop_times'                         #  4
  input.pipe P.$split()                                                   #  5
    .pipe P.$sample                     1 / 1e4, headers: true            #  6
    .pipe P.$skip_empty()                                                 #  7
    .pipe P.$parse_csv()                                                  #  8
    .pipe @$clean_stoptime_record()                                       #  9
    .pipe P.$set                        '%gtfs-type',     'stop_times'    # 10
    .pipe P.$delete_prefix              'trip_'                           # 11
    .pipe P.$dasherize_field_names()                                      # 12
    .pipe P.$rename                     'id',             '%gtfs-trip-id' # 13
    .pipe P.$rename                     'stop-id',        '%gtfs-stop-id' # 14
    .pipe P.$rename                     'arrival-time',   'arr'           # 15
    .pipe P.$rename                     'departure-time', 'dep'           # 16
    .pipe @$add_stoptimes_gtfsid()                                        # 17
    .pipe @$register                    registry                          # 18
    .on 'end', ->                                                         # 19
      info 'ok: stoptimes'                                                # 20
      return handler null, registry                                       # 21

i agree that there's a bit of line noise here, so let's rewrite that piece in cleaned-up pseudo-code:

P = require 'pipedreams'                                                  #  1
                                                                          #  2
read_stop_times = ( registry, route, handler ) ->                         #  3
  input = create_readstream route, 'stop_times'                           #  4
    | split()                                                             #  5
    | sample                     1 / 1e4, headers: true                   #  6
    | skip_empty()                                                        #  7
    | parse_csv()                                                         #  8
    | clean_stoptime_record()                                             #  9
    | set                        '%gtfs-type',      'stop_times'          # 10
    | delete_prefix              'trip_'                                  # 11
    | dasherize_field_names()                                             # 12
    | rename                     'id',             '%gtfs-trip-id'        # 13
    | rename                     'stop-id',        '%gtfs-stop-id'        # 14
    | rename                     'arrival-time',   'arr'                  # 15
    | rename                     'departure-time', 'dep'                  # 16
    | add_stoptimes_gtfsid()                                              # 17
    | register                    registry                                # 18
    .on 'end', ->                                                         # 19
      info 'ok: stoptimes'                                                # 20
      return handler null, registry                                       # 21

What happens here is, roughly:

• On line #4, input is a PipeDreams ReadStream object created as create_readstream route, label. PipeDreams ReadStreams are nothing but what NodeJS gives you with fs.createReadStream; they're just a bit pimped so you get a nice progress bar on the console which is great because those files can take minutes to process completely, and it's nasty to stare at a silent command line that doesn't keep you informed what's going on. Having a progress bar pop up is great because i used to report progress numbers manually, and now i get a better solution for free.

• On line #5, we put a split operation (as P.$split()) into the pipeline, which is just eventstream.split() and splits whatever is read from the file into (chunks that are) lines. You do not want that if you're reading, say, blockbusters.avi from the disk, but you certainly want that if you're reading all-instances-where-a-bus-stopped-at-a-bus-stop-in-northeast-germany-in-fall-2014.csv, which, if left unsplit, is an unwieldy mass of data. As the CSV format mandates an optional header line and one record per line of text, splitting into lines is a good preparation for getting closer to the data.

For those who have never worked with streams or piping, observe that we have a pretty declarative interface here that does not readily reveal how things are done and on which arguments. That's great for building an abstraction—the code looks a lot like a Table of Contents where actions are labeled (and not described in detail), but it can be hard to wrap one's mind around. Fear you not, we'll have a look at some sample methods later on; those are pretty straightforward. Believe me when i say you don't have to pass an exam on the gritty details of the NodeJS Streams API to use PipeDreams.

For the moment being, it's just important to know that what is passed between line #4 input = ... and line #5 split are some arbitrarily-sized chunks of binary data which get transformed into chunks of line-sized text and passed into line #6 sample .... The basic idea is that each step does something small / fast / elementary / generic to whatever it receives from above, and passes the result to the next stop in the pipe.

• On line #6, we have P.$sample 1 / 1e4, headers: true (for non-CS-folks: P.$sample( 1 / 1e4, { headers: true} )). Let's dissect that one by one:

  • P, of course, is simply the result of P = require 'pipedreams'. I'm not much into abbreviations in coding, but since this particular reference will appear, like, all over the place, let's make it a snappy one.

  • $sample is a method of P. I adopt the convention of prefixing all methods that are suitable as an argument to a pipe method with $. This is to signal that not sample itself, but rather its return value should be put into the pipe. When you start to write your own pipes, you will often inadvertently write input_A.pipe f, input_B.pipe f and you'll have a problem: typically you do not want to share state between two unrelated streams, so each stream must get its unique pipe members. Your piping functions are all piping function producers—higher-order functions, that is. The $ sigil is there to remind you of that: $ == 'you must call this function in order to get the function you want in the pipe'.

  • What does $sample do?—From the documentation:

    Given a 0 <= p <= 1, interpret p as the Probability to Pick a given record and otherwise toss it, so that $sample 1 will keep all records, $sample 0 will toss all records, and $sample 0.5 (the default) will toss (on average) every other record.

    In other words, the argument 1 / 1e4 signals: pick one out of 10'000 records, toss (delete / skip / omit / forget / drop / ignore, you get the idea) everything else. The use of the word 'record' is customary here; in fact, it means 'whatever you get passed as data when called'. That could be a CSV record, a line of text, a number, a list of values, anything. $sample, like many PipeDreams methods, is fully generic and agnostic. Just as the quote above says, "a stream is just a series of things over time". In the previous step we splitted a binary stream into lines of text, so a 'record' at this particular point is just that, a line of text. Move $sample two steps downstream, and it'll get to see a parsed CSV record instead.

    Now the file that is being read here happens to contain 3'722'578 records, and this is why there's that $sample command (and why it is place in front of the actual CSV parsing): to fully process every single record takes minutes, which is tedious for testing. When a record is tossed, none of the ensuing pipe methods get anything to work on; this reduces minutes of processing to seconds. Of course, you do not get the full amount of data, but you do get to work on a representative sample, which is invaluable for developing (you can even make it so that the random sample stays the same across runs, which can also be important).—You probably want to make the current ratio (here: 1 / 1e4) a configuration variable that is set to 1 in production.

    The second argument to $sample, headers: true, is there to ensure $sample won't accidentally toss out the CSV header with the field names, as that would damage the data.

It's already becoming clear that PipeDreams is centered around two things: parsing CSV files, and dealing with big files. This is due to the circumstances leading to its creation. That said, i try to keep it as general as possible to be useful for other use-cases that can profit from streams.

• On line #7, it's P.$skip_empty(). Not surprisingly, this step eliminates all empty lines. On second thought, that step should appear in front of the call to $sample, don't you think?

• On line #8, it's time to P.$parse_csv(). For those among us who are good at digesting CoffeeScript, here is the implementation; you can see it's indeed quite straightforward:

  ### http://stringjs.com/ ###
  S = require 'string'
  
  @$parse_csv = ->
    field_names = null
    return @$ ( record, handler ) =>
      values = ( S record ).parseCSV ',', '"', '\\'
      if field_names is null
        field_names = values
        return handler()
      record = {}
      record[ field_names[ idx ] ] = value for value, idx in values
      handler null, record

  For pure-JS aficionados, the outline of that is, basically,

  this.$parse_csv = function() {
    var field_names = null;
    return this.$( function( record, handler ) {
      ...
      })
    }

  which makes it clear that $parse_csv is a function that returns a function. Incidentally, it also keeps some state in its closure, as field_names is bound to become a list of names the moment that the pipeline hits the first line of the file. This clarifies what we talked about earlier: you do not want to share this state across streams—one stream has one set of CSV headers, another stream, another set. That's why it's so important to individualize members of a stream's pipe.

  It's also quite clear that this implementation is both quick and dirty: it assumes the CSV does have headers, that fields are separated by commas, strings may be surrounded by double quotes, and so on. Those details should really be made configurable, which hasn't yet happened here. Again, the moment you call P.$parse_csv would be a perfect moment to fill out those details and get a bespoke method that suits the needs at hand.

  One more important detail: the record that comes into (the function returned by) $parse_csv is a line of text; the record that goes out of it is a plain old object with named values. All the pipe member functions work in essentially this way: they accept whatever they're wont to accept and pass on whatever they see fit.

  ...which puts a finger on another sore spot, the glaring absence of meaningful type checking and error handling in this model function.

Now let's dash a little faster across the remaining lines:

• On lines #9—#18,

  .pipe @$clean_stoptime_record()                                       #  9
  .pipe P.$set                        '%gtfs-type', 'stop_times'        # 10
  .pipe P.$delete_prefix              'trip_'                           # 11
  .pipe P.$dasherize_field_names()                                      # 12
  .pipe P.$rename                     'id', '%gtfs-trip-id'             # 13
  # ...
  .pipe @$add_stoptimes_gtfsid()                                        # 17
  .pipe @$register                    registry                          # 18

  we (#9) clean the record of unwanted fields (there are quite a few in the data); then we (#10) set a field %gtfs-type to value 'stop_times' (the same for all records in the pipeline). Next (#11) we delete a redundant field name prefix using a PipeDreams method, (#12) change all the underscored field names to dashed style, (#13) rename a field and then some; we then (#17) call a custom method to add an ID field and, finally, on line #18, we register the record in a registry.