There's so many exciting improvements and features in this release. In general, the internal algorithms for determining next state, as well as actions, activities, events, and more were heavily refactored to adhere closer to the SCXML spec, as well as be easier to understand and maintain in the codebase. There's always room for improvement though, and we're always open to PRs!
Features and Improvements
- Actions (
onEntry
,onExit
,actions
) can now be named functions, which should make authoring statecharts easier. #47 (📖 Docs)- They take in two arguments:
extState
(the external state passed into thetransition(...)
method) andevent
(the event object that caused the transition)
- They take in two arguments:
- Guards (
cond
on transition configs) can now be strings, and referenced by theguards
object in the machine config. #57 (docs coming soon!)
const enoughTimeElapsed = (extState, event) => {
return event.emergency || extState.elapsed > 300;
};
const lightMachine = Machine({
initial: 'green',
states: {
green: {
on: {
TIMER: {
// string conditional
yellow: { cond: 'enoughTimeElapsed' }
},
}
},
yellow: { /* ... */ }
}
}, {
// guard config
guards: { enoughTimeElapsed }
});
- Explicit history states - no more
$history
magic (this will still work and will be deprecated in 4.0). #86 (📖 Docs)
const historyMachine = Machine({
initial: 'off',
states: {
fanOff: {
on: {
// transitions to history state
POWER: 'fanOn.hist',
HIGH_POWER: 'fanOn.highPowerHist'
}
},
fanOn: {
initial: 'first',
states: {
first: {
on: { SWITCH: 'second' }
},
second: {
on: { SWITCH: 'third' }
},
third: {},
// shallow history state
hist: {
history: true
},
// shallow history state with default
highPowerHist: {
history: true,
target: 'third'
}
},
on: {
POWER: 'fanOff'
}
}
}
});
- The
getShortestPaths
graph function now works with conditional guards when passed an external state. #100 - Guard functions (
cond
) can now access the current state value, meaning you can usematchesState
to determine if a transition should occur. #110 - Lots of tests have been added (over 300 now!) and
xstate
is now even closer to full SCXML compatibility (for most use cases, it's already compatible).
Special thanks to @mogsie for his contributions!