Composite WPF Guidance – Part 7 (Events)

In a composite application, components, such as presenters, services, and controllers, residing in different modules often need to communicate with one another based on state changes. This is a challenge due to the highly decoupled nature of a composite application because the publisher has no connection to the subscriber. Additionally, there may be threading issues because the publisher is on a different thread than the subscriber. CAL uses the EventAggregator service registered in the container for events that allow decoupling of publishers and subscribers so they can evolve independently. EventAggregator allows subscribers or publishers to locate a specific EventBase. The event aggregator also allows for multiple publishers and multiple subscribers.

As shown in the figure above the real work of connecting publishers and subscribers is done by the CompositeWpfEvent class. This is the only implementation of the EventBase class that comes out of the box in the Composite Application Library. This class maintains the list of subscribers and handles event dispatching to the subscribers.