Refactoring to Events

Event-driven programming is a flexible weapon… like a whip. Design things right, and a flick of the wrist can roll down the length of your architecture and knock a cigarette out of a man’s mouth with a supersonic snap. Design wrong, and a half-hour later you’re in the emergency room with a wadded up T-shirt clamped to your forehead.

As a front-end developer, I’ve whipped myself in the forehead more times than I care to count. Do that often enough, and you start to get an intuition about things. I’ve got a theory about event handling: make your decisions at the right level of abstraction.

Maybe this is old hat. It should have been old hat to me, too, but you can’t see how old a hat is when you’re wearing it. But first let’s talk about kinds of events.

Dry-Aged Handcrafted Vintage Content

This article was written in winter 2013, but every word still holds true.

Event Types

Events come in three flavors.


When something happens in your application, and you want to respond to it elsewhere, that causes another kind of event. I generally call these “notifications.” Displaying a popup when there’s new mail, or updating a view when the underlying data changes, or checking for that damned 140-character limit; those are all notifications. You aren’t reporting on the results of a delayed process, and crucially, you aren’t directly handling a user action.


Sometimes you set a metaphorical wheel spinning, and you want to know when it comes to rest. Downloads, uploads, API requests, background jobs of all kinds. Maybe an actual wheel. Point is, you started it; you just don’t know when it’s going to end. When it’s done, you can continue with simple straight-line code. I tend to just call these “completion” events.


The last big kind of event, and the topic of this article, is what I call an “intent.” I borrowed the term from Android, and the new “web intents” that are not quite sweeping the internet just yet. An event that forces a decision is an intent. It could be user input, it could be server data that forces you down a different code path: either way, new information just entered your system. You might have to put an extra layer in your code to turn a plain-jane click into something with a little more meat to it. Maybe something like this. Assume the existence of an Emitter mixin which adds on and emit methods.

Intents = {
  init: function() {
    var intents = this;

    // begin listening for events which reflect an intent
    $("#photos").on("click", function(event) {
      var photoId = $(this).data("photoId");
      intents.emit("intent:select-photo", photoId);


Now your UI logic is held at arm’s length: if you want to know that the user is selecting a photo, you just handle the intent:select-photo event. Many UI events could cause that intent to happen: a mouse click, a keyboard command, a press of the undo button if your app has that functionality. And by the same token, the intent could have more than one handler.

So far, we’re just talking about an event dispatcher; in fact, it’s not a long step to get from here to the Command pattern, hooking the same command action up to more than one UI component. But the real win here is conceptual: we don’t know a priori what a mouse click signifies, but “select-photo” plus a photo id is unambiguous. This pattern saves you from keeping all your domain logic in a briar patch of jQuery callbacks; but it also gives you concrete concepts to work with as your application evolves.

Response and Responsibility

Sometimes, to handle an event, you need to make decisions. Should the user be able to delete this photo? Does this link prompt a paywall? Should we display a toast notification, and if so, what data should it contain? If the event handler is close to the event source, this is easy: simply make the decision and move on.

photoSelector.on("select", function(event) {
  if ( == true) {
  } else {

Straightforward. Uncontroversial. But you know as well as I do that “straightforward” never stays that way for very long.

Working Too Hard Is Hardly Working

Take Paperless Post. Users buy coins. You use coins to gussy up your cards. Choosing a fancy card design uses coins, so when a user selects a new design, we have to handle the selection by loading up the new graphics and adjusting the layout… but we also have to add coins to the price of the card. If the card used to be free, that means we have to display a paywall, and if not, we display a brief message. On the paywall, if the user clicks the cancel button, we have to undo the design change.

Hear that sound? That distant crashing, crumbling noise? Areas of concern, smashing into each other and cracking and breaking and falling into the sea.

For a long time, we coded as if there was only one event happening here. The user chose a new card design, and we handled it like this:

  1. Change the card design.
  2. Show the right UI for the price change.

But there are two events here, not one. First the user selects the design change. We can handle that on the spot. Then the price changes. These are two different things, no two ways about it. Instead, we should handle it like this:

  1. Change the card design.
  2. Set the price.

And then handle the price change somewhere else. Different component, maybe. Heck, maybe a different architectural layer. You just have to ask yourself one thing: “Does this decision make sense here?” If your selection handler is displaying a paywall, you can bet your bottom dollar the answer is no.

In short, if your event handler is making too many decisions, look for a way to spread that hard work around. If it worked for Tom Sawyer, it can work for you.


Our situation at Paperless Post was more complicated than I’m letting on. The selection handler did not make the paywall decision… but it gathered information for it. It looked something like this.

linerSelector.on("change", function(event) {
  var newLiner = PP.assets.findById(;
  var oldCost = PP.price.calculate();
  card.liner = newLiner;
  var newCost = PP.price.calculate(); // different result now

  PP.assets.emit("assetChanged", {
    asset: newLiner,
    oldCost: oldCost,
    newCost: newCost,
    undoFunction: function() {PP.history.backtrack();}

Maybe we were too close to the barn to make out more than just some red painted wood, but we had this in our codebase for a long time. Still do, in fact. But now I know what’s wrong. To decide whether to pop the paywall, we need to know if the price went up. Sure. But why in heck is that code lumped in with the liner setter? The price calculator should handle all that business by itself. It should store its own snapshots of the past prices, and when it hears that assetChanged event, it should do its own math.


Rule of thumb: put your decisions close to the events that prompt them. If an event handler is doing too much work, maybe a new event type should exist in your system. Don’t worry that you are adding too many layers of abstraction. If you design the abstractions right up front, sure, you end up with SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory. But if you have a problem, and a new layer of abstraction is the solution, don’t look a git horse in the commit.