If you’re doing any significant amount of work with statmachines, you will most certainly encounter some conditional logic in your Statemachines. Take our vending machine.
When ever a coin is inserted, the invoked event will depend on whether the total amount of money inserted is sufficient to buy something.
If enough money has been tendered, the display should suggest that the customer make a selection. If insufficient money has been inserted, the customer should be prompted to insert more.
Conditional logic can be accomplished by using entry actions. See the diagram below.

Starting in the Accept Money
state, when a coin is inserted, the coin event is fired and the Statemachine transitions into the Coin Inserted
state. This is where it gets fun.
Upon entering of the Coin Inserted
state its entry event is invoked: count_amount_tendered
. This method will count the money and invoke the not_paid_yet
or paid
event accordingly. This will cause the Statemachine to transition into the appropriate state.
The Coin Inserted
state is unique. You wouldn’t expect to find the Statemachine in the Coin Inserted
state for any reason except to make this decision. Once the decision is made, the state changes. States like this are called Decision States.
Code
require 'rubygems'
require 'statemachine'
class VendingMachineContext
attr_accessor :statemachine
def initialize
@amount_tendered = 0
end
def add_coin
@amount_tendered = @amount_tendered + 25
end
def count_amount_tendered
if @amount_tendered >= 100
@statemachine.paid
else
@statemachine.not_paid_yet
end
end
def prompt_money
puts "$.#{@amount_tendered}: more money please"
end
def prompt_selection
puts "please make a selection"
end
end
vending_machine = Statemachine.build do
trans :accept_money, :coin, :coin_inserted, :add_coin
state :coin_inserted do
event :not_paid_yet, :accept_money, :prompt_money
event :paid, :await_selection, :prompt_selection
on_entry :count_amount_tendered
end
context VendingMachineContext.new
end
vending_machine.context.statemachine = vending_machine
vending_machine.coin
vending_machine.coin
vending_machine.coin
vending_machine.coin
Output:
$1.25: more money please
$2.50: more money please
$3.75: more money please
please make a selection
Next lesson: Superstates