In the AST, model activities more cleanly

Expected Behavior

I’m trying to create a tool to create svg visualisations of xstate state machines.

To do this I’m attempting to convert xstate machine descriptions to State Machine Cat json, which I can then feed into State Machine Cat to generate an svg.

Alongside entry and exit triggers, xstate supports the idea of activities. At the moment State Machine Cat json has a hard coded list of acceptable trigger types, which only include entry and exit.

https://github.com/sverweij/state-machine-cat/blob/develop/src/parse/smcat-ast.schema.json#L29

Would it be possible to add activity (or some equivalent) to that list?

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

I can whip up a minimal example of the problem if that is useful!

[karl]

Awesome!

That is exactly how I was modelling it in my head, so I’m very happy with that change 😀 On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 at 6:04 pm, Sander Verweij [e-mail] wrote:

I’ve been struggling with keeping the ordering as entered, but the code became really messy. So I had to get back to base 1: the model wasn’t good enough yet. entry and exit’s are similar to activities - but in the model they weren’t.

I took a look at the Harel’s original state chart paper - and noticed he calls all three of them actions (similar to the same concept on transitions). So I decided to

• rename triggers to actions
• move activities under the actions with activity as type

… which results in this AST for the above sample:

{ “states”: [ { “name”: “play”, “type”: “regular”, “actions”: [ { “type”: “entry”, “body”: “make some noise” }, { “type”: “activity”, “body”: “blink a light” }, { “type”: “activity”, “body”: “do something funny” }, { “type”: “exit”, “body”: “click” } ] } ] }

Published as 3.0.4-beta-2 on npm.

(I’ve taken the liberty to update redux-saga-state-machine/xstate-to-svg and retest it, and it seems to work OK, provided jest -u is run to update the snapshot so it expects the new (more correct) order of actions is - diff here https://gist.github.com/sverweij/238ac58539cecec834fab8e14f1e13f2/revisions

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[sverweij]

I’ve been struggling with keeping the ordering as entered, but the code became really messy. So I had to get back to base 1: the model wasn’t good enough yet. entry and exit’s are similar to activities - but in the model they weren’t.

I took a look at the Harel’s original state chart paper - and noticed he calls all three of them actions (similar to the same concept on transitions). So I decided to

• rename triggers to actions
• move activities under the actions with activity as type

… which results in this AST for the above sample:

{
    "states": [
        {
            "name": "play",
            "type": "regular",
            "actions": [
                {
                    "type": "entry",
                    "body": "make some noise"
                },
                {
                    "type": "activity",
                    "body": "blink a light"
                },
                {
                    "type": "activity",
                    "body": "do something funny"
                },
                {
                    "type": "exit",
                    "body": "click"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Published as 3.0.4-beta-2 on npm.

(I’ve taken the liberty to update redux-saga-state-machine/xstate-to-svg and retest it, and it seems to work OK, provided jest -u is run to update the snapshot so it expects the new (more correct) order of actions is - diff here)