Forwarders are the fourth and final stage of the extension pipeline, after validators, filters and mappers. Their purpose is to send mapped data onto some other process.
The choice of forwarder can be specified at the command line, using the -f option.
Four forwarders are available out-of-the-box, udp, http, file and console.
Defining custom mappers is simple. The source code for the udp forwarder should be easy to follow, but the basic pattern is to export an interface that looks like this:
{
initialise: function (options) {
}
}Where initialise is a function that takes an options object and returns the forwarder function, bound to any pertinent options. The signature for the returned forwarder function should look like this:
function (/* bound options, ... */ data, type, separator, callback) {
}The remaining/unbound arguments passed to the mapper are, in order:
data: Data returned by one of the mappers.type: Optional type that can be used to ensure sane transfer of the data.separator: Optional separator that can be used to ensure sane chunking of data, in the event that it must be broken across multiple packets.callback: Function to call after the data has been sent. The signature for this function should look like this:
function (error, bytes) {
}This conforms to the node.js convention of the first argument containing any error, or a falsey value if things went okay. The second argument should contain the number of bytes that were sent.