Feeds

Feeds allow you to sequentially process actions and transactions as they are added to a ledger, without the need for polling or keeping state in your application. This is helpful for:

• Real-time applications, such as notifications or live-updating interfaces
• Microservice architectures, where one service creates transactions and another service performs some operation in response

Order of items

A feed provides items in chronological order, starting at the time the feed is created. (This is different from listing actions and transactions, which provides items in reverse chronological order.)

Efficiency

Under the hood, the SDK reads data from a feed using a long-polling mechanism. This ensures that network round trips between your application and Sequence are kept to a minimum.

At-least-once-delivery

Transaction feeds provide at-least-once delivery of items; occasionally, an item may be delivered multiple times. Regardless of how frequently you acknowledge, it’s a good idea to design your feed processing to be idempotent, so that your application can process a given item twice or more without adverse effects.

Concurrency

Reading from a transaction feed may block your active process, so if your application does more than just consume a transaction feed, you should run the processing loop in its own thread.

In general, you should consume a transaction feed in one and only one thread. In particular, you’ll want to make sure that next and ack are called serially, within a single thread.

Data Structure

Field Descriptions

Field	Type	Description
type	string	The type of feed – action or transaction.
id	string	User-supplied or system-assigned unique identifier of the feed.
filter	string	The filter that determines which items get returned in the feed.
filter params	array of strings or ints	The ordered set of values for any placeholders (e.g $1) included in the filter.
cursor	string	A pointer to the last item acknowledged in the feed.

Example Object

Java

{
  type: "",
  id: "",
  filter: "",
  filterParams: [],
  cursor: ""
}

Node.js

{
  type: "",
  id: "",
  filter: "",
  filterParams: [],
  cursor: ""
}

Ruby

{
  type: "",
  id: "",
  filter: "",
  filter_params: [""],
  cursor: ""
}

Examples

Create a feed

Feeds can be created either in the dashboard, or from your application. When creating a feed, you can provide a filter so that the feed only returns items matching the filter. If you don’t supply a filter, the feed will return all new items (transactions or actions) as they are added to the ledger.

Java

Feed<Action> feed = new Feed<Action>.Builder()
  .setId("issuances")
  .setFilter("type=$1")
  .addFilterParameter("issue")
  .create(ledger);

Node.js

let feed = await ledger.feeds.create({
  type: 'action',
  id: 'issuances',
  filter: 'type=$1',
  filterParams: ['issue']
})

Ruby

feed = ledger.feeds.create(
  type: 'action',
  id: 'issuances',
  filter: 'type=$1',
  filterParams: ['issue']
)

Process a feed

Java

// Get feed
Feed<Action> feed = Feed.Action.get("issuances", ledger);

//Process feed item
for (Action action : feed) {
  // do something here to process the action in your application
  feed.ack();
}

Node.js

// Get feed
let feed = await ledger.feeds.get(id: 'issuances')

// Process feed item
while (true) {
  let { value: action } = await feed.next()
  // do something here to process the action in your application
  await feed.ack()
}

Ruby

# Get feed
feed = ledger.feeds.get(id: 'issuances')

# Process feed item
feed.consume do |action|
  # do something here to process the action in your application
  feed.ack
end