composite-pipes

composite-pipes
===============

Composite a sequence of piped streams into a single duplex stream.

__NOTE__: There is, it turns out, already a stream-combiner npm package whose functionality and
purpose are similar. The differences are largely internal:
__stream_combiner__ relies on duplex, which shims a proxy object that appears to be a duplex transform stream from two component streams, one readable, the other writable.

__composite-pipes__ performs a similar function but is itself a node transform stream, so the read/write endpoints of the composite actually do point to the same stream object. Six of one, half dozen of another really...

However, one advantage of the __composite-pipes__ approach is that the compositor, as an instance of a transform stream, can itself be passed the usual stream options object as an arguments and act as a default simple transforming passthrough to set options such as encoding, highWaterMark, objectMode as may be required by the destination stream.

Consider (these two are equivalent):

```javascript

var Composite = require('composite-pipes')
, PassThrough = require('streams').PassThrough
, lf = require('lf')
; //imagine a line delimiting transform stream, for example.

//The generic case a passthrough stream that chunks the data in
//a particular way required by the consumer, but something we don't
//really want to expose in userland.

var pt = new PassThrough({
objectMode: true,
highWaterMark: 7,
encoding: 'utf8'
});
var composite = new Composite([pt, lf()]);


//sugar syntax...possible because composite is a stream too!.
var composite = new Composite(lf(), {
objectMode: true,
highWaterMark: 7,
encoding: 'utf8'
});


.
.
.

// Later...
var fstream = getFileStreamSomehow();

fstream.pipe(composite)
.pipe(...)

``

By default a composite is always in objectMode but that can be overridden by explicitly setting objectMode to false`.

For even more advanced functionality checkout stream-splicer &
labeled-stream-splicer

###LICENSE###

MIT.