AgNet - silverware Networking Interface Kit

by silver Harloe

Doc Index / Message Format

Message Implementations

Perl

C - message.[ch], clientkey.[ch], mlmessages.h, msmessage.h

Perl - Message.pm, ClientKey.pm, MLMessages.pm, MSMessages.pm

The Perl Message implementation uses 'Message' objects defined in Message.pm. A Message object can also contain zero to four 'MessageArg' objects. The message IDs are stored in hashes which you can import into your namespace by doing something like 'use MSMessages qw(:all)'. The message arg types 'Integer', 'String', and 'Binary' are all defined when you 'use Messages'. The arg type 'ClientKey' is defined when you 'use ClientKey'. I know it's naughty of me to define more than one object in a .pm file, but, darnit, message arg objects are small and trivial. As a side note: there is no real difference between 'MessageArg::String' and 'MessageArg::Binary' except what they return in their 'toString' methods. The "text" you can send to clients is generally not bounded to being a string (the multiplexer won't care either way).

To compose a message, you would use the 'newFromArgs' method (even if you do not have any arguments, you at least have a message id). Each 'MessageArg' type contains a 'newFromVal' method, so, if you wanted to, say, send text to a client (for which you must have a 'ClientKey' object), you would do this: 


    $message = Message->newFromArgs($SM_MSG{'SEND_SUBCLIENT_TEXT'},
                                    MessageArg::ClientKey->newFromVal($clientkey),
                                    MessageArg::String->newFromVal($text));

And then '$message->getPacked' would give you the literal binary content to send to the multiplexer. There's a fairly good chance (unless you define your own argument types and expect them to work), you could use 'guessFromArgs' instead of 'newFromArgs' and pass the arguments directly, i.e.: 


    $message = Message->guessFromArgs($SM_MSG{'SEND_SUBCLIENT_TEXT'},
                                      $clientkey, $text);

Receiving a message is slightly more tricky. As I haven't finished the parse method, I can't really finish this section yet.

Doc Index / Message Format

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