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node-red-contrib-chunks-to-lines

Node-RED node to read line by line from a stream of chunks of text, for instance from a node-red-contrib-ui-upload widget.

This node takes a stream of chunks of data as input, from which it outputs lines of text in a controlled manner.

There is indeed a built-in back-pressure / flow-control mechanism to optimise buffering and avoid memory exhaustion, by waiting for a tick before sending the next message.

This node is compatible with the conventions used by core nodes such as split and join to work with sequences. For instance, this node can consume data coming from a node-red-contrib-ui-upload.

Example: flow.json

Node-RED flow

Input

Each received message is expected to be a chunk of a larger document.

This node expects messages with a msg.payload containing either a string (when transmitting ASCII/ANSI text) or TypedArray / Uint8Array (when transmitting multi-byte text such as Unicode UTF-8).

This node will obey the sequence information provided in msg.parts and msg.complete.

Finally, this node also awaits another type of messages containing a truthy msg.tick before releasing the next message.

Output

This node will output either one line at a time (when n=1 in corresponding option) or an array of lines, in a format (text, CSV, JSON) defined in the options.

The messages will contain updated sequence information in msg.parts and msg.complete.

Example for CSV processing (splitting a large CSV file as smaller CSV chunks) for mass insertion into a PostgreSQL database, inserting many lines at a time to improve performances: flow-sql.json

Node-RED flow

See the full description of the example of upload of a large CSV file to an SQL database.

Options

  • Output n lines at a time:

    • If n = 1, outputs one line at a time. If n ≥ 2, outputs an array of lines (see Text, CSV, or JSON options below).
    • Larger values are useful for instance to insert many lines at a time in an SQL database and increase performance.

  • Output format:

    • Text: plain format, potentially with multiple lines if the above output option is higher than one.
    • CSV: same as Text mode but with the first line repeated for each output (useful when CSV column names are provided on the first line), and disabling the msg.parts information.
    • JSON array: with one line per entry.

  • Text decoding (from binary)

    • When the input is received as text, this parameter has no effect.
    • But when the input is received in binary form, this node will have to decode it to text.
    • To do that, the encoding of the original text must be specified (UTF-8, Windows-1252, UTF-16…). Windows-1252 requires Node.js with full ICU.
    • If you do not know, leave it to the default UTF-8.

Backpressure

This node supports backpressure / flow control: it can wait for a tick before releasing the next batch of lines, to make sure the rest of your Node-RED flow is ready to process more data (instead of risking an out-of-memory condition), and also conveys this information upstream.

So this node will only output one message at first, and then await a message containing a truthy msg.tick before releasing the next message.

To make this behaviour potentially automatic (avoiding manual wires), this node declares its ability by exposing a truthy node.tickConsumer for downstream nodes to detect this feature, and a truthy node.tickProvider for upstream nodes.

Likewise, this node detects upstream nodes using the same back-pressure convention, and automatically sends ticks when its internal buffer is getting low, to ask for the next chunk of data. This is done for instance with the node-red-contrib-ui-upload widget.

As a side note, several instances of this node can be chained to test this mechanism.

Piping on command line

This node can also be used from the command line:

printf '{"payload":"A;B;C\\n1;2;3\\n4;5;6\\n7;8;9\\n10;11;12\\n"} \n {"tick": true} \n {"tick": true} \n' | \
  node ./index.js chunks-to-lines --linesFormat='"csv"' --nbLines='2'

Note: This is used for our automated test.

The CLI functionnality is provided by node-red-contrib-mock-cli.

Credits

License: Apache 2.0, 2020-2021.

Originally made by Alexandre Alapetite at the Alexandra Institute.