Best practice: how to write local plugin functions for library handlers?

[Andre Garzia]

David,

I don't know if I really understood the problem so pardon me if I give you a
non-solution. When I don't know in advance what functions I will be calling
during runtime, I usually do the following. First I create a global array
with elements which are also arrays, this stored elements have the following
keys:

name  -  a generic name for a given function, it need not be tied to the
function real name.
method - the real function/handler name of a given function or handler
type - if it is a function or a handler/command
target - a long id to the function/handler is available.

so a hello world might look like this:

myHelloA["name"] =  "helloworld"
myHelloA["method"] = "mySweetHelloWorld"
myHelloA["type"] = "command"
myHelloA["target"] = "stack "hello.rev""

With an array of such elements, I have a dictionary of available functions.
If you loops this array you can depending on the type, assemble a dispatch
or a value call. So to add more tests, you just add more elements to the
global storage array.

I use a similar code in my xmlrpc server and it works fine. Generating code
chunks at runtime and executing them might be easier to maintain than a
catch all code. I like generating code at runtime. If you're only executing
inside the IDE then you don't need "do", you can create a temp stack, set
the script of it to your runtime generated piece and call it. No penalty
there.

Hope this helps
andre

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:07 AM, David Bovill <david at architex.tv> wrote:

> Say we have a complex, but generally useful handler that loops through a
> lot
> of things, and want to call a function on each element found. For example
> it
> may be a "search" function that loops through all objects in a stack, or a
> "process' function that loops through certain nodes in an XML file. Now
> there may be all sorts of "test functions" that we would like to call
> during
> this search - the question is how to structure the library handler and be
> able to call custom test functions / handlers in the local script you are
> working on?
>
>

-- 
http://www.andregarzia.com All We Do Is Code.