How to listen to all custom events in VueJS?

Question

In my VueJS app I have a Vue instance which I'm using as an event bus for sending data between components.

It's just this:

import Vue from 'vue';
export const EventBus = new Vue();

Then in my components I import EventBus and use EventBus.$emit() and EventBus.$on().

This approach is explained here: https://alligator.io/vuejs/global-event-bus/

What I'd like to be able to do is listen to any event that is sent through EventBus. If I could bind one listener to all events I could use this for logging or to feed data into some system for my development environment that would show me all data as it went into eventBus, which would be super useful.

Is there any type of vm.$listenToEverything() that I'm missing or some way to make this work?

Answer 1

If you're in an ES6 context, you could take either of below approaches. I explain through comments.

Override through inheritance

'use strict'

import Vue from 'vue'

export class EventBus extends Vue {
  // Register a custom callback as meddler that gets called upon each event emission.
  // It can be bound to $on as well. 
  $meddle (callback) {
    this.meddler = callback
  }

  // Override Vue's $emit to call the custom meddler callback upon each event emission.
  $emit (event, ...args) {
    if (this.meddler && typeof this.meddler.call === 'function') {
      this.meddler(event, ...args)
    }

    return super.$emit(event, ...args)
  }

  // We can also override $on() to listen to callbacks being registered.
}

export default new EventBus()

Override through hijacking

Or using a "hijacking" factory class in case you don't want your Vue event bus to be wrapped. The logic is basically the same, however, in this approach we hijack, or in other words, monkey patch the methods instead of overriding them directly.

'use strict'

import Vue from 'vue'

class EventBusFactory {
  static create () {
    return this.hijack(new Vue())
  }

  static hijack (bus) {
    bus.$meddle = callback => {
      bus.meddler = callback
    }

    const orig$emit = bus.$emit
    bus.$emit = (event, ...args) => {
      if (bus.meddler && typeof bus.meddler.call === 'function') {
        bus.meddler(event, ...args)
      }

      orig$emit.call(bus, event, ...args)
    }

    return bus
  }
}

export default EventBusFactory.create()