Piet van Oostrum wrote:
Gabriel Rossetti <gabriel.rosse...@arimaz.com> (GR) wrote:

GR> Sorry if this appears twice, I sent it once with an attachment and it never
GR> arrived so maybe the attachment is posing problems. I inlined the code this
GR> time (at the bottom), thank you,

GR> Gabriel

GR> ########################## Original message ############################

GR> Hello everyone,

GR> I wrote a small example that listens for xmpp msgs in a thread. The main
GR> program calls a function that blocks (using Condition.wait) until a msg
GR> has been received and then returns the msg. When a msg arrives, it is
GR> put in a variable in the thread's object, it then calls the notify()
GR> attr on the Condition object. For some reason, this doesn't work, the
GR> thread gets the msg, tries to notify the Condition object, fails because
GR> the lock has not been acquired yet and blocks. I tried ignoring the
GR> failure, thinking that since it has not been acquired yet then when it
GR> is, it will get the msg right away and never call Condition.wait, thus
GR> not causing any problems, but this does not work either. Does someone
GR> know what I am doing wrong? I attached the code to this msg.

The code that puts the message in the variable should also acquire the
lock:


     def onMessage(self, conn, msg):
         with self._cv:
             self.message = msg
             self._cv.notify()

Thank you, that was the problem, I eventually found that
A couple of remarks:

1. I think the code is neater if all manipulation with the condition is
   done in the same class (actually in the same instance -- making this
   instance into a monitor).

The reason I didn't do that is that I don' t want the Listener to sleep, I maybe over simplified the example, I actually put them in a dictionary as they come in, so in your example, if I have several threads waiting on msgs it wouldn't work. I'm trying to make a webservice api thay will also be turned into a java .jar for people that need java. Now that I think about it, each session will have an instance of the object so msgs shouldn' t get mixed up (one connection per user), so I could block in the thread. I'll try your suggestion as I think it is cleaner.

class Listener(Thread):
    def __init__(self, ws):
        Thread.__init__(self)
        self.interrupt = Event()
        self.message = None
        self._cv = Condition()
        self.client = ws._client
        self.client.RegisterHandler('message', self.onMessage)
def onMessage(self, conn, msg):
        with self._cv:
            self.message = msg
            try:
                self._cv.notify()
            except RuntimeError:
                print "self._cv has not acquired the lock yet"
def getMsg(self):
        with self._cv:
            while !self.message
                self._cv.wait()
            return self.message

class WS(object):
    def __init__(self, username, password, res):
        self._jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(username)
        self._client = xmpp.Client(self._jid.getDomain())
#        self._cv = Condition()
def getMsg(self, mid=None):
        """
        """
        return self._listener.getMsg()

Of course I haven't tested this code as I don't have the context
modules.

2. I don't know if more than one message can be delivered in the same
   instance. If yes, than your code will not work, and neither will the
   code above as, the message instance variable is never cleared. So the
   next getMsg will be happy to deliver the previous one.
   You would have to clear it when returning this one.
Like I said above, in reality I have a dict not just a simple variable.
    def getMsg(self):
        with self._cv:
            while !self.message
                self._cv.wait()
            msg = self.message
            self.message = None
            return msg

3. If the messages come in faster than they can be processed some will
   be lost as they will overwrite the previous one in the self.message
   variable. The solution is to use a threading.Queue to transfer the
   messages from one thread to the other. This also saves you the hassle
   of doing your own synchronisation like above. If you are not familiar
   with synchronising multithreaded applications it is very easy to make
   errors and even if you are it is quite easy to do them wrong. I have
   been involved in distributed programming courses at university level
   and I have seen many errors in this area.
I used a dict because the API can also be setup to be async and use callbacks, so I had to be able to
access the msgs directly and quickly.

Gabriel
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