Dojo Topic System

Also known as Publish and Subscribe, the topic API in Dojo is very simple, though holds the same power and syntax as the event system with regard to scoping, and other magic. Publish and Subscribe are provided by Base Dojo, so no additional dojo.require call is needed beyond loading dojo.js.

Topics are an easy way for ambiguous objects, widgets, or code to communicate with other widgets and objects without prior knowledge of each other.

On a very basic level, subscribe to a topic, and run an anonymous function:

dojo.subscribe("/foo/bar/baz", function(message){
    console.log(message);
});

dojo.subscribe("/foo/bar/baz", function(message){ console.log(message); });

This code will not execute until something is published on that topic:

dojo.publish("/foo/bar/baz", {
    foo:"bar", baz:"bam"
});

dojo.publish("/foo/bar/baz", { foo:"bar", baz:"bam" });

The named topics can be whatever syntax you choose, it is just a string:

dojo.subscribe("my-custom-topic", function(message){
    console.log(message);
});
// publish can be an Array or Object
dojo.publish("my-custom-topic", ["a", "b", "c", "d"]);

dojo.subscribe("my-custom-topic", function(message){ console.log(message); }); // publish can be an Array or Object dojo.publish("my-custom-topic", ["a", "b", "c", "d"]);

Topics are used in other places in the Dojo Toolkit. The TabContainer uses pub/sub to communicate between buttons and panes internally, and allows you to subscribe for notification, and dojox.cometd uses topics to communicate across clients, for instance.

Table of Contents

• Dojo Topic System