Typically, in "constructor" you subscribe to events with lambda-functions:
function Something(){
this.on('message', function(){ ... });
}
util.inherits(Something, events.EventEmitter);
This works well but extends bad. Methods play better with inheritance:
function Something(){
this.on('message', this._onMessage);
}
util.inherits(Something, events.EventEmitter);
Something.prototype._onMessage = function(){ ... };
What are the best practices to keep these event handler functions?
if i understood the question correctly then i think that it depends on how much open for changes you are willing to be.
your second example opens the option for subclasses (or, actually, any class) to override the handler's code, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
the first example prevents overriding but at the cost of having anonymous functions (sometimes containing a lot of code) inside your constructor. however, this code can be extracted to another private function (not on the prototype, just a regular function inside the module's file).
the open-close principal deals with this kind of questions.
Related
I'm finding a little confusing sometimes you need to bind the context to a function call and sometimes not. When exactly can you avoid it and when you not?
What's the difference between those lines?
<a #click="${this.handler.bind(this)}">link</a>
<a #click="${this.handler()}">link</a>
<a #click="${this.handler}">link</a>
<a #click="${()=>this.handler()}">link</a>
Also sometimes in the constructor() you need
this.handler = this.handler.bind(this)
to make the function call works, sometimes you not. What's the differences between all those cases?
In the first 4 lines I am guessing you usually wrap them in between ${ and }.
With this mention these 3 lines:
<a #click="${this.handler.bind(this)}">link</a>
<a #click="${this.handler}">link</a>
<a #click="${()=>this.handler()}">link</a>
would be pretty similar in the effect. When you attach an event handler you need to pass a reference to a function/method to call, while the second line:
<a #click="${this.handler()}">link</a>
will most likely just be wrong. That's because you will be calling this.handler() as soon as the rendering is done. The only way it might make some sense it would be if the handler method returns a function.
Going back to the first 3 lines: they will indeed have very similar effect, as in all of them you are passing references to a local method render, but:
the first one doesn't need binding as the method will anyway be
called in this context (but I guess it doesn't hurt either)
the third one adds the definition of an anonymous function as an
event handler, which when called it will invoke this.handler
So the second one is basically the simplest and easiest to read.
When it comes to the need to call bind in some of the cases: that's needed when your method is called from another context. Let's say you pass it as a callback parameter to a method running in another class. When you method will be called there, it will have by default the context of that other object. So you will need to use .bind(this) to make sure that when the method is called in your element's context.
Your method does work, but it's running from another this. So maybe that's why some of the times you don't notice the need to .bind(this). If the method just shows a message, calls some other external service, or anything else that is not part of your object's definition (that doesn't use this.something), it will work without using bind.
UPDATE: in fact I think an event handler will always run in the context of the element that originated that event. I am guessing that lit just does that .bind(this) when we use that #click= syntax, as it would make a lot of sense.
Note that binding directly in templates is generally not a good idea. It can result in performance issues and components re-rendering when they shouldn't.
https://github.com/43081j/eslint-plugin-lit/blob/master/docs/rules/no-template-bind.md
As to why you sometimes need to bind consider this:
#customElement('main-page')
export class MainPage extends LitElement {
#property()
public name = "bob";
render() {
return html`<button #click=${this.clicked}>Click Me!</button>`;
}
clicked() {
console.log("clicked " + this.name);
console.log("this in clicked: " + this)
setTimeout(this.sayHi, 1000);
}
sayHi() {
console.log("this in sayHi: " + this)
alert(`Hello, ${this.name}!`);
}
}
If we click on the button, we get the name logged properly:
But the name isn't shown in the alert:
If we look at this in both functions we get different results:
One is an HTMLElement and the other one is a Window. What this refers to is different once we pass sayHi to setTimeout.
Bind will fix this by making sure that this refers to the right object.
While we could do setTimeout(this.sayHi.bind(this), 1000); and it would fix our issue but it's not very clean and it's error prone. We could bind it in the constructor, but this also isn't much better.
The cleanest way to do it is to directly bind this by using an arrow function instead:
sayHi = () => {
[...]
This notation binds this to the object itself. We then do not need to bind it explicitly ourselves.
Once we do that, both this refer to the right object:
I am new to Haxe and only plans to deploy for the web.
So I have a class A which has a method name doThis(). On class B, I inherited class A. I override doThis() on class B. When I check on the debugger, class A doThis() is being called and then class B doThis() is called as well.
My intuition is, I have overridden the methods explicitly and the only way I can call the parent is via a super.doThis() but it seems it does this automatically. I only want the version of doThis() to be B. Not A's.
Any thought on why it behaves like this? I think I a missing something here.
Thanks!
Without any further information, I'd bet good money that you have your debugger breakpoints on the definition of doThis, when you meant to put them in the invocation of doThis (inside the function body).
Other possible (but less likely) reasons:
A macro function is inserting a super.doThis() call
A modified Haxe compiler or JS generator is emitting a super.doThis() call.
Unless the function you are overriding is the constructor function new, calling the parent (super) function is optional. Furthermore, you can stipulate when the parent function is called by adjusting when you call super.doThis().
To illustrate, here is code that only runs the child classes function on try.haxe. It sounds like you may have already tried a similar approach, so ensure that you aren't missing some code that you may not be aware is calling the super function.
I think you're doing the right thing.
perhaps add some println to the parent function and the child function to make sure what you describe is what actually happens.
In other words, the debugger is not just playing with you.
I would like to store a variable that is shared between all stack frames (top down) in a call chain. Much like ThreadLocal in Java or C#.
I have found https://github.com/othiym23/node-continuation-local-storage but it keeps loosing context for all my use cases and it seems that you have to patch the libraries you are using to make it local-storage-aware which is more or less impossible for our code base.
Are there really not any other options available in Node? Could domains, stacktraces or something like that be used to get a handle (id) to the current call chain. If this is possible I can write my own thread-local implementation.
Yes, it is possible. Thomas Watson has spoken about it at NodeConf Oslo 2016 in his Instrumenting Node.js in Production (alt.link).
It uses Node.js tracing - AsyncWrap (which should eventually become a well-established part of the public Node API). You can see an example in the open-source Opbeat Node agent or, perhaps even better, check out the talk slides and example code.
Now that more than a year has passed since I originally asked this question, it finally looks like we have a working solution in the form of Async Hooks in Node.js 8.
https://nodejs.org/api/async_hooks.html
The API is still experimental, but even then it looks like there is already a fork of Continuation-Local-Storage that uses this new API internally.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/cls-hooked
TLS is used in some places where ordinary, single-threaded programs would use global variables but where this would be inappropriate in multithreaded cases.
Since javascript does not have exposed threads, global variable is the simplest answer to your question, but using one is a bad practice.
You should instead use a closure: just wrap all your asynchronous calls into a function and define your variable there.
Functions and callbacks created within closure
(function() (
var visibleToAll=0;
functionWithCallback( params, function(err,result) {
visibleToAll++;
// ...
anotherFunctionWithCallback( params, function(err,result) {
visibleToAll++
// ...
});
});
functionReturningPromise(params).then(function(result) {
visibleToAll++;
// ...
}).then(function(result) {
visibleToAll++;
// ...
});
))();
Functions created outside of closure
Should you require your variable to be visible inside functions not defined within request scope, you can create a context object instead and pass it to functions:
(function c() (
var ctx = { visibleToAll: 0 };
functionWithCallback( params, ctx, function(err,result) {
ctx.visibleToAll++;
// ...
anotherFunctionWithCallback( params, ctx, function(err,result) {
ctx.visibleToAll++
// ...
});
});
functionReturningPromise(params,ctx).then(function(result) {
ctx.visibleToAll++;
// ...
}).then(function(result) {
ctx.visibleToAll++;
// ...
});
))();
Using approach above all of your functions called inside c() get reference to same ctx object, but different calls to c() have their own contexts. In typical use case, c() would be your request handler.
Binding context to this
You could bind your context object to this in called functions by invoking them via Function.prototype.call:
functionWithCallback.call(ctx, ...)
...creating new function instance with Function.prototype.bind:
var boundFunctionWithCallback = functionWithCallback.bind(ctx)
...or using promise utility function like bluebird's .bind
Promise.bind(ctx, functionReturningPromise(data) ).then( ... )
Any of these would make ctx available inside your function as this:
this.visibleToAll ++;
...however it has no real advantage over passing context around - your function still has to be aware of context passed via this, and you could accidentally pollute global object should you ever call function without context.
(Pseudo-)Code
Here is a non-compilable code-sketch of the concepts I am having trouble with:
struct Data {};
struct A {};
struct B {};
struct C {};
/* and many many more...*/
template<typename T>
class Listener {
public:
Listener(MyObject* worker):worker(worker)
{ /* do some magic to register with RTI DDS */ };
public:
// This function is used ass a callback from RTI DDS, i.e. it will be
// called from other threads when new Data is available
void callBackFunction(Data d)
{
T t = extractFromData(d);
// Option 1: direct function call
// works somewhat, but shows "QObject::startTimer: timers cannot be started
// from another thread" at the console...
worker->doSomeWorkWithData(t); //
// Option 2: Use invokeMethod:
// seems to fail, as the macro expands including '"T"' and that type isn't
// registered with the QMetaType system...
// QMetaObject::invokeMethod(worker,"doSomeGraphicsWork",Qt::AutoConnection,
// Q_ARG(T, t)
// );
// Option 3: use signals slots
// fails as I can't make Listener, a template class, a QObject...
// emit workNeedsToBeDone(t);
}
private:
MyObject* worker;
T extractFromData(Data d){ return T(d);};
};
class MyObject : public QObject {
Q_OBJECT
public Q_SLOTS:
void doSomeWorkWithData(A a); // This one affects some QGraphicsItems.
void doSomeWorkWithData(B b){};
void doSomeWorkWithData(C c){};
public:
MyObject():QObject(nullptr){};
void init()
{
// listeners are not created in the constructor, but they should have the
// same thread affinity as the MyObject instance that creates them...
// (which in this example--and in my actual code--would be the main GUI
// thread...)
new Listener<A>(this);
new Listener<B>(this);
new Listener<C>(this);
};
};
main()
{
QApplication app;
/* plenty of stuff to set up RTI DDS and other things... */
auto myObject = new MyObject();
/* stuff resulting in the need to separate "construction" and "initialization" */
myObject.init();
return app.exec();
};
Some more details from the actual code:
The Listener in the example is a RTI DataReaderListener, the callback
function is onDataAvailable()
What I would like to accomplish
I am trying to write a little distributed program that uses RTI's Connext DDS for communication and Qt5 for the GUI stuff--however, I don't believe those details do matter much as the problem, as far as I understood it, boils down to the following:
I have a QObject-derived object myObject whose thread affinity might or might not be with the main GUI thread (but for simplicity, let's assume that is the case.)
I want that object to react to event's which happen in another, non-Qt 3rd-party library (in my example code above represented by the functions doSomeWorkWithData().
What I understand so far as to why this is problematic
Disclaimer: As usual, there is always more than one new thing one learns when starting a new project. For me, the new things here are/were RTI's Connext and (apparently) my first time where I myself have to deal with threads.
From reading about threading in Qt (1,2,3,4, and 5 ) it seems to me that
QObjects in general are not thread safe, i.e. I have to be a little careful about things
Using the right way of "communicating" with QObjects should allow me to avoid having to deal with mutexes etc myself, i.e. somebody else (Qt?) can take care of serializing access for me.
As a result from that, I can't simply have (random) calls to MyClass::doSomeWorkWithData() but I need to serialize that. One, presumably easy, way to do so is to post an event to the event queue myObject lives in which--when time is available--will trigger the execution of the desired method, MyClass::doSomeWorkWithData() in my case.
What I have tried to make things work
I have confirmed that myObject, when instantiated similarly as in the sample code above, is affiliated with the main GUI thread, i.e. myObject.thread() == QApplication::instance()->thread().
With that given, I have tried three options so far:
Option 1: Directly calling the function
This approach is based upon the fact that
- myObject lives in the GUI thread
- All the created listeners are also affiliated with the GUI thread as they are
created by `myObject' and inherit its thread that way
This actually results in the fact that doSomeWorkWithData() is executed. However,
some of those functions manipulate QGraphicsItems and whenever that is the case I get
error messages reading: "QObject::startTimer: timers cannot be started from another
thread".
Option 2: Posting an event via QMetaObject::invokeMethod()
Trying to circumvent this problem by properly posting an event for myObject, I
tried to mark MyObject::doSomeWorkWithData() with Q_INVOKABLE, but I failed at invoking the
method as I need to pass arguments with Q_ARG. I properly registered and declared my custom types
represented by struct A, etc. in the example), but I failed at the fact the
Q_ARG expanded to include a literal of the type of the argument, which in the
templated case didn't work ("T" isn't a registered or declared type).
Trying to use conventional signals and slots
This approach essentially directly failed at the fact that the QMeta system doesn't
work with templates, i.e. it seems to me that there simply can't be any templated QObjects.
What I would like help with
After spending about a week on attempting to fix this, reading up on threads (and uncovering some other issues in my code), I would really like to get this done right.
As such, I would really appreciate if :
somebody could show me a generic way of how a QObject's member function can be called via a callback function from another 3rd-party library (or anything else for that matter) from a different, non QThread-controlled, thread.
somebody could explain to me why Option 1 works if I simply don't create a GUI, i.e. do all the same work, just without a QGraphcisScene visualizing it (and the project's app being a QCoreApplication instead of a QApplication and all the graphics related work #defineed out).
Any, and I mean absolutely any, straw I could grasp on is truly appreciated.
Update
Based on the accepted answer I altered my code to deal with callbacks from other threads: I introduced a thread check at the beginning of my void doSomeWorkWithData() functions:
void doSomeWorkWithData(A a)
{
if( QThread::currentThread() != this->thread() )
{
QMetaObject::invokeMethod( this,"doSomeWorkWithData"
,Qt::QueuedConnection
,Q_ARG(A, a) );
return;
}
/* The actual work this function does would be below here... */
};
Some related thoughts:
I was contemplating to introduce a QMutexLocker before the if statement, but decided against it: the only part of the function that is potentially used in parallel (anything above the return; in the if statement) is--as far as I understand--thread safe.
Setting the connection type manually to Qt::QueuedConnection: technically, if I understand the documentation correctly, Qt should do the right thing and the default, Qt::AutoConnection, should end up becoming a Qt::QueuedConnection. But since would always be the case when that statement is reached, I decided to put explicitly in there to remind myself about why this is there.
putting the queuing code directly in the function and not hiding it in an interim function: I could have opted to put the call to invokeMethod in another interim function, say queueDoSomeWorkWithData()', which would be called by the callback in the listener and then usesinvokeMethodwith anQt::AutoConnection' on doSomeWorkWithData(). I decided against this as there seems no way for me to auto-code this interim function via templates (templates and the Meta system was part of the original problem), so "the user" of my code (i.e. the person who implements doSomeWorkWithData(XYZ xyz)) would have to hand type the interim function as well (as that is how the templated type names are correctly resolved). Including the check in the actual function seems to me to safe typing an extra function header, keeps the MyClass interface a little cleaner, and better reminds readers of doSomeWorkWithData() that there might be a threading issue lurking in the dark.
It is ok to call a public function on a subclass of QObject from another thread if you know for certain that the individual function will perform only thread-safe actions.
One nice thing about Qt is that it will handle foreign threads just as well as it handles QThreads. So, one option is to create a threadSafeDoSomeWorkWithData function for each doSomeWorkWithData that does nothing but QMetaMethod::invoke the non-threadsafe one.
public:
void threadSafeDoSomeWorkWithData(A a) {
QMetaMethod::invoke("doSomeWorkWithData", Q_ARG(A,a));
}
Q_INVOKABLE void doSomeWorkWithData(A a);
Alternatively, Sergey Tachenov suggests an interesting way of doing more or less the same thing in his answer here. He combines the two functions I suggested into one.
void Obj2::ping() {
if (QThread::currentThread() != this->thread()) {
// not sure how efficient it is
QMetaObject::invoke(this, "ping", Qt::QueuedConnection);
return;
}
// thread unsafe code goes here
}
As to why you see normal behaviour when not creating a GUI? Perhaps you're not doing anything else that is unsafe, aside from manipulating GUI objects. Or, perhaps they're the only place in which your thread-safety problems are obvious.
imagine you have a function that creates/copies/moves files. [logic]
For the case that a file that should be copied/created already exists you would like to ask the user to overwrite the file or not.[(G)UI]
What is your approach to implement this if (G)UI and logic are completely separated?
The first thing that comes into my mind would be the MVC-pattern, but this means that I would have to use it whereever I need user interaction.
Any other suggestions?
BTW: How would you implement this in non-OO-languages?
If GUI and logic are really separated, then this question should never arise. The program should, by design, either overwrite or not overwrite based on an option which has a default value. If the GUI is available, the option can be set.
In fact, although the obvious approach is to just have at it and begin copying, you could make a first pass looking for conflicts, and checking that the target device has enough free storage. Then, if there is a problem, terminate by doing nothing, unless there is a GUI in which case you can report the problem and ask whether to proceed anyway.
If you want to have a design in which the GUI can be invoked on a file by file basis, then design the logic around that as a set of n processes each of which copies one file, and has an optional GUI available in the error reporting section. The GUI can then reinvoke the copy-one-file logic.
I can see two ways:
You have two functions, file_exists(...) and copy_file(...). The UI side always calls file_exists first and asks the user whether to copy the file is it already exists.
You have only one function copy_file(bool force, ...), that by default fails if the file exists. So UI side calls the default version of the function, check if it failed and why, if it was because the file already exists, ask the user and try again with force=true.
In a Non OO language I would implement some kind of event queue where the parent (or child, depending on your design) UI polled for events while a 'busy' flag was true. Such an event lets the other side do other work while waiting for a 'they answered' flag to come true. Of course, some timeout in both directions would have to be observed as well as mutual exclusion. Basically, imply the principles of non-blocking I/O or your favorite theory on practical lock free programming here.
There are degrees of separation .. processes can communicate. Depending on your language of choice, you have shared memory segments, semaphores .. or IPC via relational DB with primitive signals. Its hard to be more specific with such a generic question.
See my comment, a little more information is needed so an answer can be crafted that works within your language of choice.
The first thing that comes into my mind would be the MVC-pattern, but this means that I would have to use it wherever I need user interaction.
And this is a bad thing why? Separating GUI and logic is exactly what the MVC pattern is for. Don't be scared of it just because it a has a long name -- as soon as you've separated GUI and logic you have a "view" and a "controller", at least, if not a "model" -- and if your application has state, you've got a model too. You just may not have admitted it to yourself yet.
From what I can see, there are really two problems:
We have an algorithm (logic) in which we would like to defer some operations and decisions to something else (e.g. user via UI).
We would like to avoid tight coupling between the algorithm and that something else.
If we use OO languages, there are several design patters which address these two specific problems.
Template Method pattern can solve #1. It does not solve #2 very well because the typical implementation is via inheritence.
Observer pattern looks promising too.
So really it is choosing and mixing the simplest one for the needs and most suitable for the language.
In practical terms, if talk about C# for example, we can implement Template Method and Observer hybrid like this:
// This will handle extensions to the FileCopy algorithm
abstract class FileCopyExtention
{
public abstract Response WhatToDoWhenFileExists();
}
// the copy function, pure logic
public static void Copy(string source, string destination, FileCopyExtention extension)
{
if (File.Exists(destination))
{
var response = _extension.WhatToDoWhenFileExists();
if (response == overwrite)
// overwrite the file
else
// error
}
}
// This is our user-interactive UI extension
class FileCopyUI : FileCopyExtention
{
public override Response WhatToDoWhenFileExists()
{
// show some UI, return user's response to the caller
}
}
// the program itself
void Main()
{
Copy("/tmp/foo", "/tmp/bar", new FileCopyUI());
}
As a variation of the theme, you can use events, delegates or whatever the language of your choice provides.
In C, this could be a function pointer, in C++ a reference to a class I guess.
What about this approach [pseudo-code]:
UIClass
{
//
// Some code
//
bool fileCopied = false;
do {
try {
fileCopied = CopyFile(fileName);
} catch (FileExists) {
//
// Ask "File exists! Overwrite?" If "No", exit do-loop
//
} catch (FileLocked) {
//
// Ask "File Locked! Repeat?", If "No", exit do-loop
//
} catch (etc...) {
//
// etc.
//
}
} while (!fileCopied);
//
// Some code
//
}
LogicClass
{
//
// Some code
//
bool CopyFile(string fileName)
{
//
// copy file
//
}
//
// Some code
//
}