boost async rest client - c++

I currently working on a async rest client using boost::asio::io_service.
I am trying to make the client as a some kind of service for a bigger program.
The idea is that the client will execute async http requests to a rest API, independently from the thread running the main program. So inside in the client will be another thread waiting for a request to send.
To pass the requests to the client I am using a io_service and io_service::work initialized with the io_service. I almost reused the example given on this tutorial - logger_service.hpp.
My problem is that when in the example they post a work to the service, the called handler is a simple function. In my case as I am making async calls like this
(I have done the necessary to run all the instancies of the following objects and some more in a way to be able to establish the network connection):
boost::asio::io_service io_service_;
boost::asio::io_service::work work_(io_service_); //to prevent the io_service::run() to return when there is no more work to do
boost::asio::ssl::stream<boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket> socket_(io_service_);
In the main program I am doing the following calls:
client.Connect();
...
client.Send();
client.Send();
...
Some client's pseudo code:
void MyClass::Send()
{
...
io_service_.post(boost::bind(&MyClass::AsyncSend, this);
...
}
void MyClass::AsyncSend()
{
...
boost::io_service::asio::async_write(socket, streamOutBuffer, boost::bind(&MyClass::handle_send, this));
...
}
void MyClass::handle_send()
{
boost::io_service::asio::async_read(socket, streamInBuffer, boost::bind(&MyClass::handle_read, this));
}
void MyClass::handle_read()
{
// ....treatment for the received data...
if(allDataIsReceived)
FireAnEvent(ReceivedData);
else
boost::io_service::asio::async_read(socket, streamInBuffer, boost::bind(&MyClass::handle_read, this));
}
As it is described in the documentation the 'post' method requests the io_service to invoke the given handler and return immediately. My question is, will be the nested handlers, for example the ::handle_send in the AsyncSend, called just after (when the http response is ready) when post() is used? Or the handlers will be called in another order different from the one defined by the order of post() calls ?
I am asking this question because when I call only once client->Send() the client seems to "work fine". But when I make 2 consecutive calls, as in the example above, the client cannot finish the first call and than goes to execute the second one and after some chaotic executions at the end the 2 operations fail.
Is there any way to do what I'm describing execute the whole async chain before the execution of another one.
I hope, I am clear enough with my description :)

hello Blacktempel,
Thank you for the given comment and the idea but however I am working on a project which demands using asynchronous calls.
In fact, as I am newbie with Boost my question and the example I gave weren't right in the part of the 'handle_read' function. I add now a few lines in the example in a way to be more clear in what situation I am (was).
In fact in many examples, may be all of them, who are treating the theme how to create an async client are very basic... All they just show how to chain the different handlers and the data treatment when the 'handle_read' is called is always something like "print some data on the screen" inside of this same read handler. Which, I think, is completely wrong when compared to real world problems!
No one will just print data and finish the execution of her program...! Usually once the data is received there is another treatment that has to start, for example FireAnEvent(). Influenced by the bad examples, I have done this 'FireAnEvent' inside the read handler, which, obviously is completely wrong! It is bad to do that because making the things like that, the "handle_read" might never exit or exit too late. If this handler does not finish, the io_service loop will not finish too. And if your further treatment demands once again to your async client to do something, this will start/restart (I am not sure about the details) the io_service loop. In my case I was doing several calls to the async client in this way. At the end I saw how the io_service was always started but never ended. Even after the whole treatment was ended, I never saw the io_service to stop.
So finally I let my async client to fill some global variable with the received data inside the handle_read and not to call directly another function like FireAnEvent. And I moved the call of this function (FireAnEvent) just after the io_service.run(). And it worked because after the end of the run() method I know that the loop is completely finished!
I hope my answer will help people :)

Related

Implementing a custom async task type and await

I am developing a C++ app in which i need to receive messages from an MQ and then parsing them according to their type and for a particular reason I want to make this process (receiving a single message followed by processing it) asynchronous. Since, I want to keep things as simple as possible in a way that the next developer would have no problem continuing the code, I have written a very small class to implement Asynchrony.
I first raise a new thread and pass a function to the thread:
task = new thread([&] {
result = fn();
isCompleted = true;
});
task->detach();
and in order to await the task I do the following:
while (!isCompleted && !(*cancelationToken))
{
Sleep(5);
}
state = 1; // marking the task as completed
So far there is no problem and I have not faced any bug or error but I am not sure if this is "a good way to do this" and my question is focused on determining this.
Read about std::future and std::async.
If your task runs in another core or processor, the variable isCompleted may become un-synchronized having two copies in core cache. So you may be waiting more than needed.
If you have to wait for something it is better to use a semaphore.
As said in comments, using standard methods is better anyway.

Future in akka message

good day,everyone.
i have some question about how bad is setting CompletableFuture in mesage from one actor to another and use get() to wait for it compleation. i have code example that i think is too complex to use in practice, but cant find any sutable arguments to advice to refactor it
code that send msg with future
private void onSomeSignal(SomeMsg smsg){
MessageToActor msg = new MessageToActor()
future = new CompletableFuture<>();
msg.setFuture(future);
actortRef.tell(msg, null);
response = future.get(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
/* do something with responce*/
}
code that complete future (in another actor)
private void onSomeSignal(MessageToActor msg){
response = responseService.getResponse();
msg.getFuture().complete(response);
}
is something wrong here , except that future.get() is blocking operation
Yes, doing that will come back and bite you: with this pattern you block one actor until some other actor responds, which means that if you use that elsewhere in your program there is a high risk of running into a deadlock (i.e. your whole program stops and cannot continue).
Instead of using a Future to send back a response, actors are made for sending messages. In “another actor”, you should use getContext().getSender().tell(response), and in the first actor you should handle that response as a normal message instead of the future.get() call.

Boost HTTP server issue

I'm starting to use Boost, so may be I'm messing something up.
I'm trying to set up http server with boost (ASIO). I've taken the code from docs: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples/cpp03_examples.html (HTTP Server, the first one)
The only difference from the example is I'm running server by my own method "run" and starting io_service in background thread, like in the docs: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference/io_service.html
boost::asio::io_service::work work(io_service_);
(Also I'm stopping io_service from my run method too.)
When I'm starting this modified server everything seems to be OK, run method is working fine. But then I'm trying to get a doc from the server the request hangs and control flow never comes to "request_handle" method.
Am I missing something?
UPD. Here is my code of run method:
void NetstreamServer::run()
{
LOG4CPLUS_DEBUG(logger, "NetstreamServer is running");
boost::asio::io_service::work work(io_service_);
try
{
while (true)
{
if (condition)
{
io_service_.stop();
break;
}
}
}
catch (std::exception const& e)
{
LOG4CPLUS_ERROR(logger, "NetstreamServer" << " caught exception: " << e.what());
}
}
You should call io_service_::run() - otherwise no one will dispatch the completion handlers of Asio objects serviced by io_service_.
Without including the code you changed, everyone here can only guess. Unfortunately you also do not include the compiler and the OS you are using. Even with boost claiming it is platform independent, you should always include this information, as it reality, platforms are different even with boost.
Let me do a guess. You use Microsoft Windows? How do you prevent the "main" function to exit? You moved the blocking "run" function out of it in another thread, the main function has no wait point anymore. Let me guess again, you used something like "getchar". With that, you can exit your server with only hitting the keyboard return key. If yes, the problem is the getchar, with unfortunately blocks every io of the asio socket implementation, but only on Windows based systems.
I would not need to guess if you would include the informations mentioned in your post. In particular all(!) changes you made to the code sample.

Boost Asio callback doesn't get called

I'm using Boost.Asio for network operations, they have to (and actually, can, there's no complex data structures or anything) remain pretty low level since I can't afford the luxury of serialization overhead (and the libs I found that did offer well enough performance seemed to be badly suited for my case).
The problem is with an async write I'm doing from the client (in QT, but that should probably be irrelevant here). The callback specified in the async_write doesn't get called, ever, and I'm at a complete loss as to why. The code is:
void SpikingMatrixClient::addMatrix() {
std::cout << "entered add matrix" << std::endl;
int action = protocol::Actions::AddMatrix;
int matrixSize = this->ui->editNetworkSize->text().toInt();
std::ostream out(&buf);
out.write(reinterpret_cast<const char*>(&action), sizeof(action));
out.write(reinterpret_cast<const char*>(&matrixSize), sizeof(matrixSize));
boost::asio::async_write(*connection.socket(), buf.data(),
boost::bind(&SpikingMatrixClient::onAddMatrix, this, boost::asio::placeholders::error, boost::asio::placeholders::bytes_transferred));
}
which calls the first write. The callback is
void SpikingMatrixClient::onAddMatrix(const boost::system::error_code& error, size_t bytes_transferred) {
std::cout << "entered onAddMatrix" << std::endl;
if (!error) {
buf.consume(bytes_transferred);
requestMatrixList();
} else {
QString message = QString::fromStdString(error.message());
this->ui->statusBar->showMessage(message, 15000);
}
}
The callback never gets called, even though the server receives all the data. Can anyone think of any reason why it might be doing that?
P.S. There was a wrapper for that connection, and yes there will probably be one again. Ditched it a day or two ago because I couldn't find the problem with this callback.
As suggested, posting a solution I found to be the most suitable (at least for now).
The client application is [being] written in QT, and I need the IO to be async. For the most part, the client receives calculation data from the server application and has to render various graphical representations of them.
Now, there's some key aspects to consider:
The GUI has to be responsive, it should not be blocked by the IO.
The client can be connected / disconnected.
The traffic is pretty intense, data gets sent / refreshed to the client every few secs and it has to remain responsive (as per item 1.).
As per the Boost.Asio documentation,
Multiple threads may call io_service::run() to set up a pool of
threads from which completion handlers may be invoked.
Note that all threads that have joined an io_service's pool are considered equivalent, and the io_service may distribute work across them in an arbitrary fashion.
Note that io_service.run() blocks until the io_service runs out of work.
With this in mind, the clear solution is to run io_service.run() from another thread. The relevant code snippets are
void SpikingMatrixClient::connect() {
Ui::ConnectDialog ui;
QDialog *dialog = new QDialog;
ui.setupUi(dialog);
if (dialog->exec()) {
QString host = ui.lineEditHost->text();
QString port = ui.lineEditPort->text();
connection = TcpConnection::create(io);
boost::system::error_code error = connection->connect(host, port);
if (!error) {
io = boost::shared_ptr<boost::asio::io_service>(new boost::asio::io_service);
work = boost::shared_ptr<boost::asio::io_service::work>(new boost::asio::io_service::work(*io));
io_threads.create_thread(boost::bind(&SpikingMatrixClient::runIo, this, io));
}
QString message = QString::fromStdString(error.message());
this->ui->statusBar->showMessage(message, 15000);
}
}
for connecting & starting IO, where:
work is a private boost::shared_ptr to the boost::asio::io_service::work object it was passed,
io is a private boost::shared_ptr to a boost::asio::io_service,
connection is a boost::shared_ptr to my connection wrapper class, and the connect() call uses a resolver etc. to connect the socket, there's plenty examples of that around
and io_threads is a private boost::thread_group.
Surely it could be shortened with some typedefs if needed.
TcpConnection is my own connection wrapper implementation, which sortof lacks functionality for now, and I suppose I could move the whole thread thing into it when it gets reinstated. This snippet should be enough to get the idea anyway...
The disconnecting part goes like this:
void SpikingMatrixClient::disconnect() {
work.reset();
io_threads.join_all();
boost::system::error_code error = connection->disconnect();
if (!error) {
connection.reset();
}
QString message = QString::fromStdString(error.message());
this->ui->statusBar->showMessage(message, 15000);
}
the work object is destroyed, so that the io_service can run out of work eventually,
the threads are joined, meaning that all work gets finished before disconnecting, thus data shouldn't get corrupted,
the disconnect() calls shutdown() and close() on the socket behind the scenes, and if there's no error, destroys the connection pointer.
Note, that there's no error handling in case of an error while disconnecting in this snippet, but it could very well be done, either by checking the error code (which seems more C-like), or throwing from the disconnect() if the error code within it represents an error after trying to disconnect.
I encountered a similar problem (callbacks not fired) but the circumstances are different from this question (io_service had jobs but still would not fire the handlers ). I will post this anyway and maybe it will help someone.
In my program, I set up an async_connect() then followed by io_service.run(), which blocks as expected.
async_connect() goes to on_connect_handler() as expected, which in turn fires async_write().
on_write_complete_handler() does not fire, even though the other end of the connection has received all the data and has even sent back a response.
I discovered that it is caused by me placing program logic in on_connect_handler(). Specifically, after the connection was established and after I called async_write(), I entered an infinite loop to perform arbitrary logic, not allowing on_connect_handler() to exit. I assume this causes the io_service to not be able to execute other handlers, even if their conditions are met because it is stuck here. ( I had many misconceptions, and thought that io_service would automagically spawn threads for each async_x() call )
Hope that helps.

Reference problem (I guess) when using boost::asio

I am building an HTTP client based on the example on HTTP server given at boost website. Now, the difference between that code and mine is that the example uses the server constructor to start the asynchronous operations. This makes sense since a server is supposed to listen all the time. In my client, on the other hand, I want to first construct the object and then have a send() function that starts off by connecting to the endpoint and later on sends a request and finally listens for the reply. This makes sense too, doesn't it?
When I create my object (client) I do it in the same manner as in the server example (winmain.cpp). It looks like this:
client c("www.boost.org);
c.start(); // starts the io_service in a thread
c.send(msg_);
The relevant parts of the code are these:
void enabler::send(common::geomessage& msg_)
{
new_connection_.reset(new connection(io_service_,
connection_manager_,
message_manager_, msg_
));
boost::asio::ip::tcp::resolver resolver(io_service_);
boost::asio::ip::tcp::resolver::query query(host_address, "http");
resolver.async_resolve(query, boost::bind(
&enabler::handle_resolve,
boost::ref(*this),
boost::asio::placeholders::error,
boost::asio::placeholders::iterator
));
}
void enabler::run()
{
io_service_.run();
}
The problem with this is that the program gets stuck somewhere here. The last thing that prints is the "Resolving host", after that the program ends. I don't know why because the io_service should block until all async operations have returned to their callbacks. If, however, I change the order of how I call the functions, it works. If I call run() just after the call to async_resolve() and also omit calling start() in my main program, it works!
In this scenario, io_service blocks as it should and I can see that I get a response from the server.
It has something to do from the fact that I call run() from inside the same class as where I call async_resolve(). Could this be true? The I suppose I need to give a reference from the main program when I call run(), is it like that?
I have struggled with getting io_service::work to work but the program just gets stuck and yeah, similar problems as the one above occur. So it does not really help.
So, what can I do to get this right? As I said earlier, what I want is to be able to create the client object and have the io_service running all the time in a separate thread inside the client class. Secondly to have a function, send(), that sends requests to the server.
You need to start at least some work before calling run(), as it returns when there is no more work to do.
If you call it before you start the async resolve, it won't have any work so it returns.
If you don't expect to have some work at all times, to keep the io_service busy, you should construct an io_service::work object in some scope which can be exited without io_service::run() having to return first. If you're running the io_service in a separate thread, I would imagine you wouldn't have a problem with that.
It's sort of hard to know what you're trying to do with those snippets of code. I imagine that you'd want to do something along these lines:
struct client
{
io_service io_service_;
io_service::work* w_;
pthread_t main_thread_;
client(): w_(new io_service::work(io_service)) { ... }
void start() { pthread_create(&main_thread_, 0, main_thread, this); }
static long main_thread(void* arg) { ((client*)arg)->io_service_.run(); }
// release the io_service and allow run() to return
void stop() { delete w_; w_ = 0; pthread_join(main_thread_); }
};