ACE Tutorial 015
Building a protocol stream

The Protocol_Task implementation takes care of the open(), close(), put() and svc() methods so that derivatives can concentrate on the send() and recv() methods. After a while you find that most ACE_Task<> derivatives look very similar in the four basic methods and only need one or two additional to do any real work.

    // $Id: page13.html,v 1.12 1999/04/03 21:56:30 jcej Exp $

    #include "Protocol_Task.h"

    // Construct the object and remember the thread count.
    Protocol_Task::Protocol_Task(void)
    {
        ;
    }

    Protocol_Task::~Protocol_Task(void)
    {
        ;
    }

    int Protocol_Task::open(void *arg)
    {
      ACE_UNUSED_ARG(arg);

      return(0);
    }

    int Protocol_Task::close(u_long flags)
    {
        return 0;
    }

    /* When a message is put() onto the task, it's time to process() some data.
    */
    int Protocol_Task::put(ACE_Message_Block *message,ACE_Time_Value *timeout)
    {
        return this->process(message,timeout);
    }

    /* Return an error since we don't want the task to ever be activated.
     */
    int Protocol_Task::svc(void)
    {
        return -1;
    }

    /* There's nothing really magic about process().  We just decide if
       we're moving data upstream or downstream and invoke the appropriate
       virtual function to handle it.
    */
    int Protocol_Task::process(ACE_Message_Block * message, ACE_Time_Value *timeout)
    {
        if( this->is_writer() )
        {
            return this->send(message,timeout);
        }

        return this->recv(message,timeout);
    }

    /* We must insist that derivatives provide a meaningful overload for
       these methods.  It's fairly common for ACE object methods to return
       an error when an overload is expected but the method cannot be
       safely made pure virtual.
     */

    int Protocol_Task::send(ACE_Message_Block *message,
                            ACE_Time_Value *timeout)
    {
        return -1;
    }

    int Protocol_Task::recv(ACE_Message_Block * message,
                            ACE_Time_Value *timeout)
    {
        return -1;
    }

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