Distributed Event Bus

Distributed Event bus system allows to publish and subscribe to events that can be transferred across application/service boundaries. You can use the distributed event bus to asynchronously send and receive messages between microservices or applications.

Providers

Distributed event bus system provides an abstraction that can be implemented by any vendor/provider. There are two providers implemented out of the box:

LocalDistributedEventBus is the default implementation that implements the distributed event bus to work as in-process. Yes! The default implementation works just like the local event bus, if you don't configure a real distributed provider.
RabbitMqDistributedEventBus implements the distributed event bus with the RabbitMQ. See the RabbitMQ integration document to learn how to configure it.
KafkaDistributedEventBus implements the distributed event bus with the RabbitMQ. See the Kafka integration document to learn how to configure it.

Using a local event bus as default has a few important advantages. The most important one is that: It allows you to write your code compatible to distributed architecture. You can write a monolithic application now that can be split into microservices later. It is a good practice to communicate between bounded contexts (or between application modules) via distributed events instead of local events.

For example, pre-built application modules is designed to work as a service in a distributed system while they can also work as a module in a monolithic application without depending an external message broker.

Publishing Events

There are two ways of publishing distributed events explained in the following sections.

IDistributedEventBus

IDistributedEventBus can be injected and used to publish a distributed event.

Example: Publish a distributed event when the stock count of a product changes

using System;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Volo.Abp.DependencyInjection;
using Volo.Abp.EventBus.Distributed;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    public class MyService : ITransientDependency
    {
        private readonly IDistributedEventBus _distributedEventBus;

        public MyService(IDistributedEventBus distributedEventBus)
        {
            _distributedEventBus = distributedEventBus;
        }
        
        public virtual async Task ChangeStockCountAsync(Guid productId, int newCount)
        {
            await _distributedEventBus.PublishAsync(
                new StockCountChangedEvent
                {
                    ProductId = productId,
                    NewCount = newCount
                }
            );
        }
    }
}

PublishAsync method gets a single parameter: the event object, which is responsible to hold the data related to the event. It is a simple plain class:

using System;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    [EventName("MyApp.Product.StockChange")]
    public class StockCountChangedEto
    {
        public Guid ProductId { get; set; }
        
        public int NewCount { get; set; }
    }
}

Even if you don't need to transfer any data, you need to create a class (which is an empty class in this case).

Eto is a suffix for Event Transfer Objects we use by convention. While it is not required, we find it useful to identify such event classes (just like DTOs on the application layer).

Event Name

EventName attribute is optional, but suggested. If you don't declare it, the event name will be the full name of the event class, AbpDemo.StockCountChangedEto in this case.

About Serialization for the Event Objects

Event transfer objects must be serializable since they will be serialized/deserialized to JSON or other format when it is transferred to out of the process.

Avoid circular references, polymorphism, private setters and provide default (empty) constructors if you have any other constructor as a good practice (while some serializers may tolerate it), just like the DTOs.

Inside Entity / Aggregate Root Classes

Entities can not inject services via dependency injection, but it is very common to publish distributed events inside entity / aggregate root classes.

Example: Publish a distributed event inside an aggregate root method

using System;
using Volo.Abp.Domain.Entities;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    public class Product : AggregateRoot<Guid>
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        
        public int StockCount { get; private set; }

        private Product() { }

        public Product(Guid id, string name)
            : base(id)
        {
            Name = name;
        }

        public void ChangeStockCount(int newCount)
        {
            StockCount = newCount;
            
            //ADD an EVENT TO BE PUBLISHED
            AddDistributedEvent(
                new StockCountChangedEto
                {
                    ProductId = Id,
                    NewCount = newCount
                }
            );
        }
    }
}

AggregateRoot class defines the AddDistributedEvent to add a new distributed event, that is published when the aggregate root object is saved (created, updated or deleted) into the database.

If an entity publishes such an event, it is a good practice to change the related properties in a controlled manner, just like the example above - StockCount can only be changed by the ChangeStockCount method which guarantees publishing the event.

IGeneratesDomainEvents Interface

Actually, adding distributed events are not unique to the AggregateRoot class. You can implement IGeneratesDomainEvents for any entity class. But, AggregateRoot implements it by default and makes it easy for you.

It is not suggested to implement this interface for entities those are not aggregate roots, since it may not work for some database providers for such entities. It works for EF Core, but not works for MongoDB for example.

How It Was Implemented?

Calling the AddDistributedEvent doesn't immediately publish the event. The event is published when you save changes to the database;

For EF Core, it is published on DbContext.SaveChanges.
For MongoDB, it is published when you call repository's InsertAsync, UpdateAsync or DeleteAsync methods (since MongoDB has not a change tracking system).

Subscribing to Events

A service can implement the IDistributedEventHandler<TEvent> to handle the event.

Example: Handle the StockCountChangedEto defined above

using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Volo.Abp.DependencyInjection;
using Volo.Abp.EventBus.Distributed;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    public class MyHandler
        : IDistributedEventHandler<StockCountChangedEto>,
          ITransientDependency
    {
        public async Task HandleEventAsync(StockCountChangedEto eventData)
        {
            var productId = eventData.ProductId;
        }
    }
}

That's all.

MyHandler is automatically discovered by the ABP Framework and HandleEventAsync is called whenever a StockCountChangedEto event occurs.
If you are using a distributed message broker, like RabbitMQ, ABP automatically subscribes to the event on the message broker, gets the message, executes the handler.
It sends confirmation (ACK) to the message broker if the event handler was successfully executed (did not throw any exception).

You can inject any service and perform any required logic here. A single event handler class can subscribe to multiple events but implementing the IDistributedEventHandler<TEvent> interface for each event type.

If you perform database operations and use the repositories inside the event handler, you may need to create a unit of work, because some repository methods need to work inside an active unit of work. Make the handle method virtual and add a [UnitOfWork] attribute for the method, or manually use the IUnitOfWorkManager to create a unit of work scope.

The handler class must be registered to the dependency injection (DI). The sample above uses the ITransientDependency to accomplish it. See the DI document for more options.

Pre-Defined Events

ABP Framework automatically publishes distributed events for create, update and delete operations for an entity once you configure it.

Event Types

There are three pre-defined event types:

EntityCreatedEto<T> is published when an entity of type T was created.
EntityUpdatedEto<T> is published when an entity of type T was updated.
EntityDeletedEto<T> is published when an entity of type T was deleted.

These types are generics. T is actually the type of the Event Transfer Object (ETO) rather than the type of the entity. Because, an entity object can not be transferred as a part of the event data. So, it is typical to define a ETO class for an entity class, like ProductEto for Product entity.

Subscribing to the Events

Subscribing to the auto events is same as subscribing a regular distributed event.

Example: Get notified once a product updated

using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Volo.Abp.DependencyInjection;
using Volo.Abp.Domain.Entities.Events.Distributed;
using Volo.Abp.EventBus.Distributed;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    public class MyHandler : 
        IDistributedEventHandler<EntityUpdatedEto<ProductEto>>,
        ITransientDependency
    {
        public async Task HandleEventAsync(EntityUpdatedEto<ProductEto> eventData)
        {
            var productId = eventData.Entity.Id;
            //TODO
        }
    }
}

MyHandler implements the IDistributedEventHandler<EntityUpdatedEto<ProductEto>>.

Configuration

You can configure the AbpDistributedEntityEventOptions in the ConfigureServices of your module to add a selector.

Example: Configuration samples

Configure<AbpDistributedEntityEventOptions>(options =>
{
    //Enable for all entities
    options.AutoEventSelectors.AddAll();

    //Enable for a single entity
    options.AutoEventSelectors.Add<IdentityUser>();

    //Enable for all entities in a namespace (and child namespaces)
    options.AutoEventSelectors.AddNamespace("Volo.Abp.Identity");

    //Custom predicate expression that should return true to select a type
    options.AutoEventSelectors.Add(
        type => type.Namespace.StartsWith("MyProject.")
    );
});

The last one provides flexibility to decide if the events should be published for the given entity type. Returns true to accept a Type.

You can add more than one selector. If one of the selectors match for an entity type, then it is selected.

Event Transfer Object

Once you enable auto events for an entity, ABP Framework starts to publish events on the changes on this entity. If you don't specify a corresponding Event Transfer Object (ETO) for the entity, ABP Framework uses a standard type, named EntityEto, which has only two properties:

EntityType (string): Full name (including namespace) of the entity class.
KeysAsString (string): Primary key(s) of the changed entity. If it has a single key, this property will be the primary key value. For a composite key, it will contain all keys separated by , (comma).

So, you can implement the IDistributedEventHandler<EntityUpdatedEto<EntityEto>> to subscribe the events. However, it is not a good approach to subscribe to such a generic event. You can define the corresponding ETO for the entity type.

Example: Declare to use ProductEto for the Product entity

Configure<AbpDistributedEntityEventOptions>(options =>
{
    options.AutoEventSelectors.Add<Product>();
    options.EtoMappings.Add<Product, ProductEto>();
});

This example;

Adds a selector to allow to publish the create, update and delete events for the Product entity.
Configure to use the ProductEto as the event transfer object to publish for the Product related events.

Distributed event system use the object to object mapping system to map Product objects to ProductEto objects. So, you need to configure the mapping. You can check the object to object mapping document for all options, but the following example shows how to configure it with the AutoMapper library.

Example: Configure Product to ProductEto mapping using the AutoMapper

using System;
using AutoMapper;
using Volo.Abp.Domain.Entities.Events.Distributed;

namespace AbpDemo
{
    [AutoMap(typeof(Product))]
    public class ProductEto : EntityEto
    {
        public Guid Id { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
    }
}

This example uses the AutoMap attribute of the AutoMapper to configure the mapping. You could create a profile class instead. Please refer to the AutoMapper document for more options.

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