What is this?

Web worker service for Angular 2.

Install

npm i angular2-web-worker

API

export interface IWebWorkerService {
    run<T>(workerFunction: (any) => T, data?: any): Promise<T>;
    runUrl(url: string, data?: any): Promise<any>;
    terminate<T>(promise: Promise<T>): Promise<T>;
}

• run
  • workerFunction:
    • Must be a self-contained function. Cannot reference outside variables.
    • You can import other libraries with importScripts though
    • These are okay:

    • run(input => input * input, 10);
      
      run(input => {
          const square = num => num * num;
          return square(input);
      }, 10);
      
      const someFunction = (input) => input * input);
      run(someFunction, 10);
      
      class Runner {
          private webWorkerService = new WebWorkerService();
          constructor() {
              this.webWorkerService.run(this.someFunction, 10);
          }
          someFunction() {
              return input * input;
          }
      }
      

    • These will probably NOT work:

    • // this is not okay because inside the context of the web worker `this` is not the same `this` as here.
      run(input => this.square(input), 10); 
      
      // this is not okay because `_` doesn't exist in the web worker context (assuming tht `_` is available here to begin with)
      run(input => {
          return _.uniqueId() * input;
      }, 10);
      

  • data: serializable data
• runUrl: Basically the same as
  • url: The url you would use to create a Worker instance
  • data: Same as the run method
• terminate: Calling this will terminate the web worker, if it is still running.
  • promise: The Promise instance returned by run or runUrl.

Example

Check out angular2-web-worker-example for a sample project, or see app/app.component.ts for usage with an Angular 2 application.

export class AppComponent implements OnInit {
    constructor(private _webWorkerService: WebWorkerService) {
    }
    
    ngOnInit() {
        const input = 100;
        const promise = this._webWorkerService.run(this.someCPUHeavyFunction, input);
        promise.then(result => console.log(result));
    }
    
    someCPUHeavyFunction (input) {
        return input * 10;
    }
}