Morpher

A morpher is basically an implementation of a portal that does not directly interact with an external data source but instead acts as a conversion or aggregation mechanism. Its purpose is to receive data from one or multiple portals and emit them in some other form for another portal.

Intention

Morphers are multi-purpose-utilities when it comes to moving data from one portal to another while modifying it on the fly. A simple example could be the following use-case:

Say you have an ecommerce portal that emits orders and customers. You also have a customer support portal that can receive support tickets. The goal is to convert orders and their respective customers into support tickets. You cannot configure a route from your ecommerce portal directly to your customer support portal, because they do not support the same data types and also you have to combine an order with a customer to have enough information for a support ticket.

Your morpher would have two receivers. One for orders and one for customers. Both of them store their received objects in the Key-Value-Storage. The order receiver will publish a support ticket object whenever it saves an order to the Key-Value-Storage.

The morpher also has an emitter supporting those support ticket objects. It will load an order from the Key-Value-Storage and (using the customer-id from said order object) it will then try to load a customer from the Key-Value-Storage. If a customer is found, all the necessary informations are present and can be converted to a new support ticket object which is then emitted. If the customer cannot be found, the order is re-published, so the emitter can try again later.

Usage

While the example above is the most common way to use a morpher, it is by far not the only way. A morpher is technically indistinguishable from an ordinary portal. It is its unique role as an intermediate portal that makes it a morpher. Because of that, there are numerous possibilities for what a morpher can do and it almost certainly comes down to an individual use-case.

Here are some examples for what a morpher could potentially do.

• Convert one data type to another one.
• Combine multiple objects into a single new one, even when the original objects are emitted at different times.
• Measure the throughput between two portals by logging every transfer.
• Throttling the throughput between two portals to comply with API rate limits.