after reading some related code, I am leaning towards a design
to mirror the way command messages are sent over the UI-Bus.
Unfortunately this pretty much abandons the possibility to
invoke these operations from a client written in C or any
other hand made language binding. Which pretty much confirms
my initial reservation towards such an excessively open
and generic interface system.
...this means to turn Looper into a state machine.
Yet it seems more feasible, since the DispatcherLoop has a nice
checkpoint after each iteration through the while loop, and we'd
keep that whole builder-dirty business completely confined within
the Looper (with a little help of the DispatcherLoop)
Let's see if the state transition logic can actually be implemented
based just on such a checkpoint....?
....if by some weird coincidence, a command dispatched into the session
happens to trigger session shutdown or re-loading, this will cause a deadlock,
since decommissioning of session data structures must wait for the
ProcDispatcher to disable command processing -- and this will obviously
never happen when in a callstack below some command execution!
After some consideration, it became clear that this service implementation
is closely tied to the DispatcherLoop -- which will consequently be
responsible to run and expose this service implementation
need to keep state variables on both levels,
since the session manager (lifecycle) "opens" the session
for external access by starting the dispatcher; it may well happen
thus that the session starts up, while the *session subsystem*
is not(yet) started
"command dispatching" == the public session interface
so we'll better implement this important causal link directly,
instead of some obscure trickery with lifecycle events.
mark TODOs in code to make that happen.
Actually, it is not hard to do so, it just requires to combine
all the existing building blocks. When this is done, we can define
the "Session" subsystem as prerequisite for "GUI" in main.cpp
Unless I've made some (copy-n-paste) mistake with defining the facades,
this should be sufficient to pull up "the Session" and automatically
let the Gui-Plugin connect against the SessionCommandService
...the sheer amount of mechanical replacements scattered all over these
files might be a vivid indication, that the design of the interface system
is subobptimal ;-)
Completely removed the nested hierarchy, where
the top-level implementation forwarded to yet another
sub-implementation of the same interface. Rather, this
sub-implementation (OpClosure) is now a mere implementation
detail class without VTable, and without half-baked
re-implementation of the CmdClosure interface. And the
state-switch from unbound to bound arguments is now
implemented as a plain-flat boolean flag, instead of
hiding it in the VTable.
To make this possible, without having to rewrite lots of
tests, I've created a clone of StorageHolder as a
"proof-of-concept" dummy implementation, for the sole
purpose of writing test fixtures. This one behaves
similar to the real-world thing, but cares only
for closing the command operation and omits all
the gory details of memento capturing and undo.
Seems this was part of the confusion when looking at
the inheritance graph: Names where almost reversed
to the meaning. the ArgumentHolder was *not* the
argument holder, but the top level closure. And
the class "Closure" was not "the" Closure, but
just the argument holder. ;-)
based on the new generic tuple builder, we're now able to
add a new binding function into the command implementation
machinery, alongside the existing one. As it stands, the
latter will be used rather by unit tests, while the new
access path is what will be actually taken within
the application, when receiving argument binding
messages dispatched via the UI-Bus.
this was a classical example of a muddled and messed-up design,
driven just by the fact that I wanted to "spare" some functions,
with the net effect of writing more functions, plus a proxy class
plus create a lot of confusion for the reader.
This was easy to resolve though, once I resorted to the
general adivice to make public interface methods final,
make the extension ponts protected and never
to chain two extension points
- remove unnecessary includes
- expunge all remaining usages of boost::format
- able to leave out the expliti string(elm) in output
- drop various operator<<, since we're now picking up
custom string conversions automatically
- delete diagnostics headers, which are now largely superfluous
- use newer helper functions occasionally
I didn't blindly change any usage of <iostream> though;
sometimes, just using the output streams right away
seems adequate.
...and learned a lot about the new type_traits on the way.
As it seems, it is not possible to get a clean error message
when passing an "object" with no custom string conversion;
instead, some overload for an rvalue-ostream kicks in.
probably I'll go for shoing a type string in these cases
