Connect a Source to a Subscriber with RxJS `pipe`
Observable's pipe method is all about connecting a source to a subscriber through an operator. While you wouldn't normally manually invoke connect the pieces together the way this lesson does, it's important to understand how the internals work before working with the RxJS api.
Instructor: [00:00] Because we want this logic inside of an operator rather than just wrapping a subscriber right here, we're going to have to move it earlier than the subscribe call, or into the internals of an observable subscriber call. I can extract this here. Let's start by creating just a new observable. I'll just call this one O.
[00:24] In that subscribe call, the observable checks to see if there is an operator set. A quick warning before I go further, this is considered internals. You don't want to do this manually like this, but it's important to understand what's going on.
[00:39] This operator is an object that has a call function on it. Inside of that call, we can take this source observable and subscribe to that same double subscriber. Now, you won't see anything logged out yet, because we need to call O.subscriber.
[01:00] Right now, this is only working, because all we essentially do is copy and paste this line into this call. Just showing the call is called when you call subscribe. What we want to do is, pass the subscriber into here, and that subscriber is passes into here, and then passed into my double subscriber.
[01:21] You can see now we still have two, four, six, eight, because this subscriber is going into here, and being passed in a call, and then being passed into my double subscriber. Also, we want to extract this source to make this more usable. I'll call this source. Call this source here.
[01:42] The way this gets extracted is by saying O.source is that observable. Again, the disclaimer that this source and this operator shouldn't be use this way. This is really just a step in the education towards how to actually do this, but you can see that everything is working as expected.
[02:00] We get our two, four, six, eight, and our double gets one, two, three, four, five before it doubles and passes on to the destination which is the subscriber. Unfortunately, we're now stuck in the scenario where we're subscribing to this observable, and not this one. We wanted to subscribe to that original one and then modify that.
[02:19] If I were to do that right now, we are skipping our double. You can see this is never called, because those are white, because all the connection is happening inside of here. You probably thinking, wouldn't it be great if we could switch over to this observable somewhere?
[02:36] Luckily for us, that's where pipe comes into play. If I just cut all the code out and say .pipe. .pipe takes a function which takes a source and returns a source. You can see we're still just one, two, three, four, five, because it's doing the exact same thing as if there were no pipe function right now, because it's just passing along that same source.
[03:00] What I can do here is if I select this source and create a block here and paste in that code that I wrote before and return O, you'll see that now we're back in business where you have 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and this time we're starting with this observable.
[03:17] One last thing to do here, is this source has been passed down and that's this. I can take that and have it be assigned to this source of this observable. I'm going to leave a note here saying, "Don't do it this way."