Dispatching is a convenient mechanism for separating concerns with loosely-coupled code: register named callbacks and then call them with arbitrary arguments. A variety of D3 components, such as d3-request, use this mechanism to emit events to listeners. Think of this like Node’s EventEmitter, except every listener has a well-defined name so it’s easy to remove or replace them.
Related Readings
var dispatch = d3.dispatch("statechange");
dispatch.on('statechange', function(e){ console.log(e) })
setTimeout(function(){dispatch.statechange('Hello, world!')}, 3000)