[Haskell-cafe] Domain Events in haskell

[Rouan van Dalen]

Hi Cafe,

I am trying to write a very simple implementation of an event publisher pattern but I am stuck and do
not know how to do this in Haskell.

I have the following code:

========================


{-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes, NamedFieldPuns #-}

module Domain.DomainEventPublisher where

   import Control.Monad (forM_)

   import HsFu.Data.DateTime
   import Domain.Client


   data DomainEvent = ClientChangeAgeDomainEvent


   data DomainEventContext =
      DomainEventContext { domainEventContext_event      :: DomainEvent
                         , domainEventContext_occurredOn :: DateTime
                         } deriving (Show)


   data DomainEventPublisher = DomainEventPublisher { domainEventPublisher_subscribers :: [DomainEventContext -> IO ()] }


   mkEventPublisher :: DomainEventPublisher
   mkEventPublisher = DomainEventPublisher []


   subscribe :: DomainEventPublisher -> (DomainEventContext -> IO ()) -> DomainEventPublisher
   subscribe publisher eventHandler =
      DomainEventPublisher { domainEventPublisher_subscribers = eventHandler : (domainEventPublisher_subscribers publisher) }


   publish :: DomainEventPublisher -> DomainEventContext -> IO ()
   publish DomainEventPublisher{ domainEventPublisher_subscribers } event =
      forM_ domainEventPublisher_subscribers ($ event)

========================


My problem is that the publish method returns IO (), which means that events can only be
published from the IO monad, but I would like events to be 'publish-able' from pure code.

I can live with event handlers (passed into the subscribe function) being in the IO monad.

Is there a better way to implement this pattern in Haskell?

I have been racking my brain on this for a while now and cannot seem to come up with a
good implementation.

Regards
--Rouan.