Marble Diagrams and Rx

Today I am going to discuss how to draw Marble Diagrams. I just came across it in the Reactive Framework. In Channel 9 videos, Jeffrey Van Gogh shows how to get started with Rx. Ever since I look deep into it, I find it very interesting, and perhaps a new way of thinking or understanding for Asynchronous programming structure. Reactive Framework introduces a few operators, which you might apply to an Observable to get the resultant observable. The way to represent each of these attributes can be done using Marble Diagrams.
Before you start dealing with Reactive Framework, it is good to start with IObservable and IObserver. I have already introduced with these two interfaces which are the building blocks for the Reactive Framework. You can read these articles before going through with Marble Diagrams.

• Observer and Observable - A New Addition to BCL
• Implementation of an Observer

How to Create a Marble Diagram

Marble diagram is basically a way to represent the Rx operations. You may think of a marble diagram to be a pictorial representation of different operators that are defined with Reactive Framework. Let's look at how to create a Marble Diagram:

So in the sample image, you can see that we measure Time in X-Axis while operations on Y-axis. Say for instance, you have an Observable which is represented by the first horizontal line. The small circles represent OnNext calls of IObserver. If you know already, read about Observable and Observer, you might already know that each Observer has the OnNext method, which gets invoked whenever the observer changes its state. Hence, in our case the observer invokes a function f() to get to the new State. The | represents the OnComplete for the Observer. So after OnComplete, the Observer will stop observing states.

We represents OnError using X in a marble diagram. In case of an Observable, OnError and OnComplete produces the end point for the observer. So, here after executing the two OnNext if the Observer encounters with an Exception, OnError gets invoked and the Observer will terminate.
So on the first image, we execute the function f() to get the new state with the Bottom Line. Now on, I am going to create a few Marble Diagrams, to make your understanding clear.

SelectMany

SelectMany is very easy to explain. Say you have two or more Observers. In this case, SelectMany will eventually invoke all the OnNext of each observer.

So if you have 3 observers, the SelectMany will produce Observer which aggregates all of them.

var ob1 = Observable.Return(5);
 var ob2 = Observable.Return(4);

 var ob3 = ob1.SelectMany(ob2);
 var disp = ob3.Subscribe(   r => Console.WriteLine("OnNext"), 
                             r => Console.WriteLine("Completed"), 
                            () => Console.WriteLine("Error"));
            
 disp.Dispose();

So the Observer will select from each of the Observers and get you the output.

In case of an error, the final Observer will stop when the first error of any Observer is encountered.

SkipUntil / SkipWhile

SkipWhile and SkipUntil work in opposite. Say for instance, you have two Observables. SkipUntil gives you OnNext for each of them until the OnNext from the other observer is received. On the contrary, SkipWhile will produce OnNext for the Observer while the OnNext from the second observer is received. When the second observer is Complete or gives an error, the final observer will terminate in case of SkipWhile.

So in the above diagrams, you can see While will bypass all the values until the second observer receives an entry.

Further Reference

To learn the operators of Marble Diagrams, you can see the latest Videos on Channel 9. Here are a few more Operators:

• SelectMany
• Zip
• Until / WaitUntil
• Merge
• Repeat
• OnErrorResumeNext
• Retry

I hope this will help you to understand the Marble Diagrams, and hope these will describe some more operators of Rx Framework.