In this article, we’ll discuss pipeable operators introduced in RxJS 5.5. The previous articles in this series include:

1. Basic Terms
2. Operators map, filter, and reduce
3. Using Observable.create()
4. Using RxJS Subject
5. The flatMap operator
6. The switchMap operator
7. Handling errors with the catch operator

Pipeable operators are those that can be chained using the pipe() function, whereas dot-chaining operators are chained with the dot as shown in this blog. Let’s discuss the dot-chaining operators first to understand why the pipeable operators were introduced in RxJS.

If you have RxJS installed, the dot-chaining operators can be imported from the directory rxjs/add/operator, for example:

import 'rxjs/add/operator/map';
import 'rxjs/add/operator/filter';

These operators patch the code of the Observable.prototype and become a part of this object. If later on, you decide to remove say filter operator from the code that handles the observable stream but will forget to remove the corresponding import statement, the code that implements filter remains a part of the Observable.prototype. When the bundlers will try to eliminate the unused code (a.k.a. tree shaking), they may decide to keep the code of the filter operator in the Observable even though it’s not being used in the app.

RxJS 5.5 introduced pipeable operators that are pure functions and do not patch the Observable. You can import operators using the ES6 import syntax (e.g. import {map} from ‘rxjs/operators’) and then wrap them into a function pipe() that takes a variable number of parameters, i.e. chainable operators.

The subscriber in the next code snippet will receive the same data as the ones from the first code sample in this blog, but it’s a better version from the tree-shaking perspective because it uses pipeable operators. The next code sample includes the import statement assuming that RxJS is locally installed.

import {map, filter} from 'rxjs/operators'; // 1
...
Rx.Observable.from(beers)
    .pipe(  // 2
         filter(beer => beer.price < 8) ,
         map(beer => ${beer.name}: $${beer.price})
      ) 
    .subscribe( 
        beer => console.log(beer),
        err => console.error(err),
        () => console.log("Streaming is over")
);

1.Importing pipeable operators from rxjs/operators instead of rxjs/add/operator
2. Wrapping pipeable operators into the function pipe()

Now if you’ll remove the line filter from the above code snippet, the tree-shaking module of the bundlers (e.g. Webpack 4) can recognize that the imported function is not used and the code of the filter operator won’t be included in the bundles.

To see it in action in CodePen, follow this link.

NOTE: Since the pipeable operators are standalone functions, to avoid conflicts with the JavaScript catch statement the pipeable version of the catch operator is called catchError.

Debugging observables

The operator do and its pipeable equivalent tap performs a side effect (e.g. log some data) for every value emitted by the source observable, but returns an observable that is identical to the source. In particular, these operators can be used for debugging purposes.

Say, you have a chain of operators and want to see the observable values before and after a certain operator is applied. The tap operator will allow you to log the values:

import { map, tap } from 'rxjs/operators';

myObservable$
  .pipe(
    tap(beer => console.log(`Before: ${beer}`)),
    map(beer => `${beer.name}, ${beer.country}`),
    tap(beer => console.log(`After: ${beer}`))
  )
  .subscribe(...);

In this example, we print the emitted value before and after the map operator is applied. The tap operator doesn’t change the observable data – it just passes it through to the next operator or the method subscribe().

Refactor your code to use exclusively pipeable operators, because starting from RxJS 6, the dot-chaining operators will be supported only if you install a compatibility package.