ACE Tutorial 001
A Beginners Guide to Using the ACE Toolkit

Now we begin to look at the acceptor object.

Kirthika has this analogy:

Consider an office:

Reactor: Receptionist

Event_Handlers: various Departments catering to specific needs.

SERVER_PORT: door

Acceptor: Doorkeeper

Thus when a needy person (client) enters the open door (port) maintained by the doorkeeper (acceptor waiting for connection request), the receptionist(reactor) directs the person towards the appropriate section (event_handler) which would cater to his needs.

    // $Id: page03.html,v 1.11 1999/04/03 21:56:23 jcej Exp $

    #ifndef _CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H
    #define _CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H

    /* A SOCK_Acceptor knows how to accept socket connections.  We'll use
      one of those at the heart of our Logging_Acceptor.  */
    #include "ace/SOCK_Acceptor.h"

    #if !defined (ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE)
    # pragma once
    #endif /* ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE */

    /* An Event_Handler is what you register with ACE_Reactor.  When
      events occur, the reactor will callback on the Event_Handler.  More
      on that in a few lines.  */
    #include "ace/Event_Handler.h"

    /* When a client connects, we'll create a Logging_Handler to deal with
      the connection.  Here, we bring in that declaration.  */
    #include "logger.h"

    /* Our Logging_Acceptor is derived from ACE_Event_Handler.  That lets
      the reactor treat our acceptor just like every other handler.  */
    class Logging_Acceptor : public ACE_Event_Handler
    {
    public:

      /* For this simple case we won't bother with either constructor or
        destructor.  In a real application you would certainly have them.  */

      /* Here's the open() method we called from main().  We have two
        things to accomplish here: (1) Open the acceptor so that we can
        hear client requests and (2) register ourselves with the reactor
        so that we can respond to those requests.  */
      int open (const ACE_INET_Addr &addr,
                ACE_Reactor *reactor)
      {
        /* Perform the open() on the acceptor.  We pass through the
          address at which main() wants us to listen.  The second
          parameter tells the acceptor it is OK to reuse the address.
          This is necessary sometimes to get around closed connections
          that haven't timed out.  */
        if (this->peer_acceptor_.open (addr, 1) == -1)
          return -1;

        /* Remember the reactor we're using.  We'll need it later when we
          create a client connection handler.  */
        reactor_ = reactor;

        /* Now we can register with the reactor we were given.  Since the
          reactor pointer is global, we could have just used that but it's
          gross enough already.  Notice that we can pass 'this' right into
          the registration since we're derived from ACE_Event_Handler.  We
          also provide ACCEPT_MASK to tell the reactor that we want to
          know about accept requests from clients.  */
        return reactor->register_handler (this,
                                          ACE_Event_Handler::ACCEPT_MASK);
      }

    private:

      /* To provide multi-OS abstraction, ACE uses the concept of
        "handles" for connection endpoints.  In Unix, this is a
        traditional file descriptor (or integer).  On other OS's, it may
        be something else.  The reactor will need to get the handle (file
        descriptor) to satisfy it's own internal needs.  Our relevant
        handle is the handle of the acceptor object, so that's what we
        provide.  */
      ACE_HANDLE get_handle (void) const
      {
        return this->peer_acceptor_.get_handle ();
      }

      /* When an accept request arrives, the reactor will invoke the
        handle_input() callback.  This is where we deal with the
        connection request.  */
      virtual int handle_input (ACE_HANDLE handle)
      {
        /* The handle provided to us by the reactor is the one that
          triggered our up-call.  In some advanced situations, you might
          actually register a single handler for multiple connections.
          The _handle parameter is a way to sort 'em out.  Since we don't
          use that here, we simply ignore the parameter with the
          ACE_UNUSED_ARG() macro.  */
        ACE_UNUSED_ARG (handle);

        Logging_Handler *svc_handler;

        /* In response to the connection request, we create a new
          Logging_Handler.  This new object will be used to interact with
          the client until it disconnects.  Note how we use the
          ACE_NEW_RETURN macro, which returns -1 if operator new fails. */
        ACE_NEW_RETURN (svc_handler,
                        Logging_Handler,
                        -1);

        /* To complete the connection, we invoke the accept() method call
          on the acceptor object and provide it with the connection
          handler instance.  This transfers "ownership" of the connection
          from the acceptor to the connection handler.  */
        if (this->peer_acceptor_.accept (*svc_handler) == -1)
          ACE_ERROR_RETURN ((LM_ERROR,
                             "%p",
                             "accept failed"),
                            -1);

        /* Again, most objects need to be open()ed before they are useful.
          We'll give the handler our reactor pointer so that it can
          register for events as well.  If the open fails, we'll force a
          close().  */
        if (svc_handler->open (reactor_) == -1)
          svc_handler->close ();

        return 0;
      }

    protected:

      /* Our acceptor object instance */
      ACE_SOCK_Acceptor peer_acceptor_;

      /* A place to remember our reactor pointer */
      ACE_Reactor *reactor_;
    };

    #endif /* _CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H */

It is important to notice here that we have done very little application-specifc code in developing this object. In fact, if we take out the progress information, the only app-specific code is when we create the new Logging_Handler object to give to the accept function. You may begin to wonder why there isn't a C++ template that does all of this coding for you. Actually, the ACE toolkit happens to have one handy:

typedef ACE_Acceptor <YourHandlerClass, ACE_SOCK_ACCEPTOR> YourAcceptorClass;

We would have used it like this:

typedef ACE_Acceptor <Logging_Handler, ACE_SOCK_ACCEPTOR> Client_Acceptor;

This will create a piece of code similar to what I've shown above. The primary difference is that the handle_input function created by the template does NOT register the handler with the reactor. In the long-run, that is good for us because we can then move that logic into the open function of the Logging_Handler and use a completely-generic acceptor.

Now that we know how to accept a connection request, let's move on to the next page where we learn how to handle the actual connection. Even though we just learned about this cool template thing, we will continue to use the "hand-written" acceptor developed above. As I mentioned, the only difference will be in the open function of the connection handler anyway.

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