Serialising Flows

Introduction

Before introducing flow serialising, is important to remind that Conan Flows are 2 dimensional data structures.

We believe that for most use cases, when you would like to access a flow you would like to serialise it.

Let's illustrate this graphically. Let's use again the authentication example:

Status	State 1	State 2	State 3	State 4	State 5
notAuthenticated	💡 ''		💡 'invalid password'
authenticating		💡 [username/TACOS]		💡 [username/password]
authenticated					💡 credentials

We provide you with two serialisation mechanisms, one to serialise everything, the other one to serialise a single status.

Both of them leverage Conan State to provide you the final serialised result.

toStateAll() - Serialising everything

authentication$F.toStateAll()

By serialising all, you will create a ConanState of Status

From the example above, this would be the visual equivalent of the generate ConanState.

	State 1	State 2	State 3	State 4	State 5
nextData	name notAuthenticated data ''	name authenticating data username/ TACOS	name notAuthenticated data 'invalid pass..'	name authenticating data username/ password	name authenticated data credentials

toState(statusName) - Serialising a single status

Similar to toStateAll, toState statusName), will generate a ConanState of the data type associated to the status being serialised.

Let's have a look at a couple of examples

authentication$F.toState('notAuhtenticated')

Will generate a ConanState which will provide the following states

	State 1	State 2
nextData	''	'invalid password'

authentication$F.toState('authenticating')

Will generate a ConanState which will provide the following states

	State 1	State 2
nextData	[username/TACOS]	[username/password]

To see some example for serialisation, check our Testing State, in that example, we leverage the serialisation of flows to show what the underlying meta flow is doing

Using Conan Flows

You might be familiar with the TACOS acronym that describe the attributes for Conan Data.

Conan State documents these in detail in its different document sections.

By being able to transform Conan Flows into Conan State, you should be able to leverage these attributes for Conan Flows too.

Note that for convenience we also provide with some shortcuts for observing flows, but we think the best way to leverage flows is to convert them into Conan State.