Reactive Framework Getting your LINQ on by ThinqLinq

Reactive Framework Getting your LINQ on

Last time in our exploration of the Reactive Framework, we built a random Observable event generator. Now that we have our data source, we can start working with it. In the past, we would have hooked up event handlers to the event delegate and imperatively interacted with the values passed in the sender and EventArgs. Of course, when we Thinq LINQ, we try to find simpler, more declarative models to represent our intent.

To start, we need to instantiate and start our event generator:


Private Sensor as New ObservableSensor
Sensor.StartSensor()

Now that we are generating Observables, we can process them using LINQ query comprehensions. For example, if we wanted to filter out only the sensors who's type is "4", we could use this LINQ:


Dim TypeSensors = From s In Sensor
                  Where s.SensorType = "4"
                  Select s

If we wanted to filter out only those sensor readings that are low (less than 3), and only return the sensor's value, we could include the filter (Where) and projection (Select). The following results in an IObservable(Of Double) rather than IObservable(Of SensorInfo) that we started with.


Dim lowValueSensors = From s In Sensor
                      Where s.SensorValue < 3
                      Select s.SensorValue

Of course, if you prefer the Lambda syntax over query comprehensions, you can use those interchangeably with rX just as you would with LINQ. The following query waits for the first case where the sensor value is high (over 17) and fires OnNext returning a boolean once the value is hit.


Dim AnySensor = Sensor.Any(Function(s) s.SensorValue > 17)

All's well in LINQ land with rX, right? Well kind of. Doing these simple projections and filters are straight forward. However, if we start trying to use sorting, grouping, and aggregations, we start running into additional challenges. With these query types, we can't start returning results until the entire set of events is known. Since we're working with a potentially infinite stream of events, we will need to figure out how to partition the results and work with those segments. That will be a task for a future post.

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