fsm2 0.10.0

FSM2 provides an implementation of the core design aspects of the UML state diagrams allowing both declarative transitions and dynamic transitions along with Guard Conditions.

FSM2 provides an implementation of the core design aspects of the UML state diagrams.

FMS2 is derived from the FSM library which in turn was inspired by Tinder StateMachine library.

State Machines transitions can be defined both declaratively and procedurally.

Guard Conditions from the UML 2 specification are also supported.

FSM2 uses a builder to delcare each state machine.

Your application may declare as many statemachines as necessary.

Delcarative State Transitions

import 'package:fsm2/fsm2.dart';

void main() {
  final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnMelted, Liquid>())
 ));

The above examples creates a Finite State Machine (machine) which delcares its initial state as being Solid and then declares a single transition which occurs when the event OnMelted event is triggered causing a transition to a new state Liquid.

To trigger an event:

machine.transition(OnMelted());

After the above call to transition machine.currentState will return Liquid().

Guard conditions

FSM2 supports guard conditions which only allow an event to cause a transition if the Event or State meets some condition.

Guard conditions allow you to declare (via the on builder) the same Event multiple times from a single State. When registring multiple events of the same type only a single event may have an empty guard condition and it MUST be the last event added to the state.

If a State has the same event registered multiple times then the transitions will be evaluated in order. The first transition whose guard condition returns true will be triggered. No further guard conditions will be evaluated. A transition without a Guard Condtions always evaluates to true.

import 'package:fsm2/fsm2.dart';

void main() {
  final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnHeat, Liquid>(condition: s.temperature + e.deltaDegrees > 0)
       ..on<OnHeat, Boiling>(condition: s.temperature + e.deltaDegrees > 100)
      ..on<OnMelted, Liquid>())
 ));

You can see from the above example that the OnHeat contains a field deltaDegrees. It is often useful to pass arguments to your events which can then be applied to the State. To pass a value into an event.

machine.transition(OnHeat(deltaDegrees: 25));

Side Effects

FSM2 allows you to specify side effects for a transition. The side effect is a lambda which will be called when the transition is triggered. A transition that fails to pass its guard condition will not be triggered and its side effect will not be called.

void main() {
  final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnHeat, Liquid>(sideEffect: () => print('I melted'), condition: s.temperature + e.deltaDegrees > 0)
 ));

onEnter/onExit

The onEnter/onExit methods allow you to define actions that are peformed when we enter or leave a State. It doesn't matter what event caused the new State.

An example might be calculating the State's pressure. It doesn't matter why we entered a State, the state must always refect its current temperature so using an onEnter method makes this simple.

Example

A simple example showing the life cycle of H2O.

import 'package:fsm/fsm.dart';

void main() {
  final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnMelted, Liquid>(sideEffect: () => print('Melted'),
          )))
    ..state<Liquid>((b) => b
      ..onEnter((s, e) => print('Entering ${s.runtimeType} State'))
      ..onExit((s, e) => print('Exiting ${s.runtimeType} State'))
      ..on<OnFroze, Solid>sideEffect: () => print('Frozen'),
          ))
      ..on<OnVaporized, Gas>(sideEffect: () => print('Vaporized'),
          )))
    ..state<Gas>((b) => b
      ..on<OnCondensed, Liquid>(sideEffect: () => print('Condensed'),
          )))
    ..onTransition((t) => print(
        'Recieved Event ${t.event.runtimeType} in State ${t.fromState.runtimeType} transitioning to State ${t.toState.runtimeType}')));

  print(machine.currentState is Solid); // TRUE

  machine.transition(OnMelted());
  print(machine.currentState is Liquid); // TRUE

  machine.transition(OnFroze());
  print(machine.currentState is Solid); // TRUE
}

Analyze

FSM2 includes a method to check the integrity of your FSM machine.

The analyse method checks that there is a path from the initial state to every state in the tree.

The analyse method outputs a log noting any States that can't be reached.

To run an analysis:

final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnMelted, Liquid>(sideEffect: () => print('Melted'),
          )))
   ));
await machine.analyse();

Visualise your FSM

It can be useful to visualise you FSM and with that in mind FSM2 is able to export your FSM to the dot format.

https://www.graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html

There are a number of tools tha can display a dot file, the simplest is xdot which can be installed by:

apt install xdot

To generate a dot file run:

final machine = StateMachine.create((g) => g
    ..initialState(Solid())
    ..state<Solid>((b) => b
      ..on<OnMelted, Liquid>(sideEffect: () => print('Melted'),
          )))
   ));
await machine.export('/path/to/dot/file');

You can then visualise the results via:

xdot /part/to/dot/file

Example classes

The above examples use the following classes.

class Solid implements State {}

class Liquid implements State {}

class Gas implements State {}

class OnMelted implements Event {}

class OnFroze implements Event {}

class OnVaporized implements Event {}

class OnCondensed implements Event {}

class OnHeat implements Event {
  int deltaDegrees;
  OnHeat({this.deltaDegrees})
}

Features and bugs

Please file feature requests and bugs at the issue tracker.