[Paraview-developers] Client-Server MultiThread problem

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

We have tried to improve our steering/vis interface by adding a WaitCondition object to our server side objects so that when they have received data, a thread is awoken and signals the GUI to act.

Method one requires us the use of a special thread in the gui, which calls
  proxy->InvokeCommand("WaitForReady")
this causes the client server stream handling code to invoke a method on the server which waits until completion and then returns. It works, but we have discovered that the client server stream (+ messaging) is not thread safe, so whilst we are waiting on that thread, if we use the same proxy object to send other commands, we get problems - the errors are actually quite specific to one particular scenario and I'll sip the details unless asked.

Previously, we got around this by simply using a timer in the GUI, which instead did
  proxy->InvokeCommand("IsReadySignalPresent")
and this did not have two threads simultaneously using the same client server stream. The downside being that the timer was constantly running and we wanted to try a sleep condition.

Our ideal solution would be for the pvservers (which are hosting our data receive classes) to be able to emit a custom signal to the paraview client, using the standard mechanism used by the rest of paraview, to say that data has been received and we would like to do processing with it.

Is it possible to add a custom message into the core paraview message handling between client and server so that we can tell pvservers to send a "DSM data ready" message to the client, and then hook this to a callback in our plugin which will then take over and operate on the data using the normal channels? If so, can you point me to any code that does something similar so that I might tweak it (does coprocessing do anything similar anywhere?).

[I've glossed over some of the details here as we use one thread on the server for data/messaging and one on the client for triggering updates and the process is a bit more complex than described, but if we were able to tell pvserver to send a custom message, we could simplify things somewhat]

thanks

JB

-- 
John Biddiscombe,                            email:biddisco @ cscs.ch
http://www.cscs.ch/
CSCS, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre  | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.07
Via Cantonale, 6928 Manno, Switzerland      | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82