electron-channel

A dead simple ipc wrapper for electron

A very simple way to comunicate between the main and the render process in electron. It is based on ipc but uses callbacks in the render process instead of event listeners.

Example

An example of sending and handling messages between the render and the main process. The render process will send a request to the main process to read a file. The main process will read the file and send the content of the file to the render process.

Main process

//Import dependencies
var fs = require('fs');
var channel = require('electron-channel/main');

//Register a listener that reads the content of a file and return the file content
channel('read-file', function(data, done)
{
  //Data is an object with the following keys 
  // data.filename: path to the file to read 
  // data.encoding: default encoding
  
  //Read the file 
  return fs.readFile(data.filename, data.encoding, function(error, content)
  {
    //Call the done function with the error and the file content
    return done(error, content);
  });
});

Render process

//Import dependencies 
var channel = require('electron-channel/render');

//Read the content of a file in the main process 
channel('read-file', { filename: './file.txt', encoding: 'utf8'}, function(error, content)
{
  //Check the error reading the file 
  if(error){ /* do something with the error */ } 
  
  //Work with the content of the file 
  // ...
});

API

Main process

Import the channel manager in the main process by adding the following line:

var channel = require('electron-channel/main');

channel(name, listener)

Register a new channel that will listen to all events with the name name. For each request to this channel the listener function will be executed.

The listener method will be executed with the following arguments:

• data: an object with the data sent by the render process.
• done: a function used to reply to the render process. All the arguments passed to the done function will be the arguments of the callback function in the render process, so you can use it to reply data to the render process.

Example:

var channel = require('electron-channel/main'); 

//Register a channel 
channel('name', function(data, done)
{
  //Work with the data object 
  //... 
  
  //Reply to the render process 
  return done();
});

Render process

Import the channel manager in the render process by adding the following line:

var channel = require('electron-channel/render');

channel(name, data, callback)

Emit a new request to the main process with the name name. The data argument must be an object with all the information that will be passed to the main process.

When the done function in the main process is called, the callback function will be executed with all the arguments passed to the done function in the main process.

Example:

var channel = require('electron-channel/render');

//Create the object will all the data that you want to pass to the main process 
var obj = { ... };

//Emit a new request/message to the main process 
channel('name', obj, function()
{
  //Work with the response 
  //...
});

License

MIT LICENSE © Josemi Juanes.