the (trivial) implementation turned out to be correct as written,
but it was (again) damn challenging to get the mulithreaded chaotic
test fixture and especially the lambda captures to work correct.
- concept for a first preliminary implementation of dispatch into the UI thread
- define an integration effort to build a complete working communication chain
This change was caused by investigation of UI event loop dispatch;
since the GTK UI is designed to run single threaded, any invocation
from other threads need to be diepatched explicitly.
A possible way to achieve this is to use Glib::Dispatcher, which
in turn requires that the current thread (which is in this case the UI thread)
already holds a Glib::MainContext
This prompted me to create a tight link between the external facade interfaces
of the UI and the event loop itself. What remains to be settled is how
to hand over arguments to the action in the main loop
After investigation of current GTK and GIO code, I came to the conclusion
that we do *not* want to rely on the shiny new Gtk::Application, which
provides a lot of additional "convenience" functionality we do neither
need nor want. Most notably, we do not want extended desktop integration
like automatically connecting to D-Bus or exposing application actions
as desktop events.
After stripping away all those optional functions and extensions, it turns
out the basic code to operate the GTK main event loop is quite simple.
This changeset extracts this code from the (deprecated) Gtk::Main and
integrates it directly in Lumiera's UI framework object (UiManager).
this is just a tiny change to make things more othogonal.
Now the unwinding and calls to any GTK / Widget dtors happen *after*
emitting the term signal from UI shutdown. Which means, the other subsystems
are shutting down (in their dedicated threads) as well, thus lowering
the probability of some action still using the UI and triggering an exception
as it turned out, the former functionality was deactivated in 2009
with changeset 6151415
The whole concept seems to be unfinished, and needs to be reworked
and integrated with "Views and Perspectives" (whatever that is...)
See also #1097
Gtk::Main is deprecated, but the new solution, instantiating a
Gtk::Application object does not match our use case, since we handle
all application concerns already and just need a Gtk main loop to run.
Anyway, it became clear that the "main object" will be the new UiManager.
As a first step, I've now moved the (deprecated) Gtk::Main object
down there. Next step (planned) will be to inherit from Gio::Application
and clone some functionality from Gtk::Application
...which opens more questions than it solves at the moment.
Especially note #1096, the question how to refer to object-IDs
Maybe we need to enable sending EntryIDs via GenNode?
Anyway, the magic spell is broken now: we have a way how to
establish commands and how to issue them from the UI, with full integration
of UI-Bus, layer separation facade, instance management and ProcDispatcher
Looks like a stepping stone
after extended analysis, it turned out to be a "placeholder concept"
and introduces an indirection, which can be removed altogether
- simple command invocation happens at gui::model::Tangible
- it is based on the command (definition) ID
- instance management happens automatically and transparently
- the extended case of context-bound commands will be treated later,
and is entirely self-contained
while the initial design treated the commands in a strictly top-down manner,
where the ID is known solely to the CommandRegistry, this change and information
duplication became necessary now, since by default we now always enqueue and
dispatch anonymous clone copies from the original command definition (prototype).
This implementation uses the trick to tag this command-ID when a command-hanlde
is activated, which is also the moment when it is tracked in the registry.
in accordance to the design changes concluded yesterday.
- in the standard cases we now check the global registry first
- automatically create anonymous clone copy from global commands
- reorganise code internally to use common tail implementation
as it turns out, we can always trigger commands right away,
the moment all arguments are known. Thus it is sufficient to
send a single argument binding message, which allows us to
get rid of a lot or ugly complexities (payload visitor).
It seems more adequate to push the somewhat intricate mechanics
for the "fall back" onto generic commands down into the implementation
level of CommandInstanceManager. The point is, we know the standard
usage situation is to rely on the instance manager, and thus we want
to avoid redundant table lookups, only to support the rare case of
fallback to global commands. The latter is currently used only from
unit-tests, but might in future also be used by scripts.
Due to thread safety considerations, I have refrained from handing
out a direct reference to the command token sitting in the registry,
even while not doing so incurs a small runtime penalty (accessing
the shared ref-count for creating a copy of the smart-handle).
This is the typical situation where you'd be tempted to sacrifice
sanity for the sake of an imaginary performance benefit, which
in fact is dwarfed by all the machinery of UI-Bus and argument
passing via GenNode.
but I am not happy with the implementation yet: the maybeGet just
doesn't feel right. Likely it will be a better idea to push that
fallback mechanism generally down into the CommandInstanceManager?
just by reasoning from the concept, an instance should always correspond
to a single invocation trail. Having several sets of invocation state
compete with each other, means to keep them distinct, otherwise the
implicit state is going to be corrupted
This changeset fixes a huge pile of problems, as indicated in the
error log of the Doxygen run after merging all the recent Doxygen improvements
unfortunately, auto-linking does still not work at various places.
There is no clear indication what might be the problem.
Possibly the rather unstable Sqlite support in this Doxygen version
is the cause. Anyway, needs to be investigated further.
this is indeed a change of concept.
A 'command instance' can not be found through the official
Command front-end anymore, since we do not create a registration.
This allows us to avoid decorating command IDs with running counters
interesting new twist: we do not even need to decorate with a running number,
since we'll get away with an anonymous command instance, thanks to Command
being a smart-handle
this is a prerequisite for command instance management:
We have now an (almost) complete framework for writing actual
command definitions in practice, which will be registered automatically.
This could be complemented (future work) by a script in the build process
to regenerate proc/cmd.hpp based on the IDs of those automatic definitions.
The point in question is how to manage these definitions in practice,
since we're about to create a huge lot of them eventually. The solution
attempted here is heavily inspired by the boost-test framework
...because this topic serves as a vehicle to elaborate various core concepts
of the UI backbone, especially how to access, bind and invoke Proc-Layer commands
...turns out to be a nasty subject, now we're able to see
in more concrete detail how this interaction needs to be carried out.
Basically this is a blocker for the top-level, since it is obviously
some service in top-level, which ultimately becomes responsible for
orchestrating this activity
