Prism’s event aggregator is great for decoupling UI state changes when UI events occur, but sometimes you need to perform some larger, long-running task on a background thread — uploading a file, for example.

Here’s a quick example of an encapsulated event handler listening off the Prism event bus, and using Windsor’s IStartable facility to handle event subscription:

public class TradeCancelledEventHandler : ICompositePresentationEventHandler, IStartable
{
    private readonly IEventAggregator eventAggregator;

    protected TradeCancelledEventHandler(IEventAggregator eventAggregator)
    {
        if (eventAggregator == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("eventAggregator");

        this.eventAggregator = eventAggregator;
    }

    public void Start()
    {
        // Register to receive events on the background thread
        eventAggregator
            .GetEvent<TradeCancelledEvent>()
            .Subscribe(Handle, ThreadOption.BackgroundThread);
    }

    public void Stop()
    {
        eventAggregator
            .GetEvent<TradeCancelledEvent>()
            .Unsubscribe(Handle);
    }

    void Handle(TradeCancelledEventArgs eventArgs)
    {
        // ... do stuff with the event
    }
}

Each event handler is effectively a little service running in the container. Note ICompositePresentationEventHandler is a simple role interface that allows us to register them all at once in the IoC container:

public interface ICompositePresentationEventHandler {}

...

container.AddFacility<StartableFacility>();

// Register event handlers in container
container.Register(
    AllTypes
        .Of<ICompositePresentationEventHandler>()
        .FromAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()));

June 24, 2010

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