Boost ASIO - How to write a console server 2 - c++

Question

I'm trying to write a game server to run on Ubuntu Server (No GUI), and I'm having problems right at step 1. I'm new to C++, so please bear with me.
I need to be able to type commands to the server at any given point while it continues running. Since cin is a blocking input, that won't fly. I've dug around and it seems the way to go is to use Boost's ASIO library.
This answer comes incredibly close to fulfilling my needs, but I still need to know two more things:
1: The "command" passed from input seems to be limited to 1 char at a time. I need MUCH more than single key inputs, eg "shutdown", "say 'Hello World!'", "listPlayers -online", etc. I tried adapting the code to use string, instead of char:
#include <boost/asio.hpp>
#include <boost/bind.hpp>
#include <boost/enable_shared_from_this.hpp>
#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace boost::asio;
class Input : public boost::enable_shared_from_this<Input>
{
public:
typedef boost::shared_ptr<Input> Ptr;
public:
static void create(
io_service& io_service
)
{
Ptr input(
new Input( io_service )
);
input->read();
}
private:
explicit Input(
io_service& io_service
) :
_input( io_service )
{
_input.assign( STDIN_FILENO );
}
void read()
{
async_read(
_input,
boost::asio::buffer( &_command, sizeof(_command) ),
boost::bind(
&Input::read_handler,
shared_from_this(),
placeholders::error,
placeholders::bytes_transferred
));
}
void read_handler(
const boost::system::error_code& error,
size_t bytes_transferred
)
{
if ( error ) {
std::cerr << "read error: " << boost::system::system_error(error).what() << std::endl;
return;
}
if ( _command.compare( "\n" ) != 0 ) {
std::cout << "command: " << _command << std::endl;
}
this->read();
}
private:
posix::stream_descriptor _input;
std::string _command;
};
int main()
{
io_service io_service;
Input::create( io_service );
io_service.run();
}
However, this causes a segmentation error after a few characters of input, and pressing enter after entering any input no longer causes "command: " to appear. Is there a way to have this setup use string? I'm sure appending them to a separate string one character at a time will work, but I'd like to think this setup would work natively with entire strings.
2: (Edited for clarification) I need this non-blocking input to work in tandem with the rest of my server code. The question is: where does that code go? I call your attention to the main() function from above, modified to use a while loop, and call a mainLoop function:
bool loopControl = true;
int main()
{
io_service io_service;
Input::create( io_service );
// This loops continually until the server is commanded to shut down
while( loopControl )
{
io_service.run(); // Handles async input
mainLoop(); // Where my actual program resides
}
}
Even if everything else worked, control still won't ever reach mainLoop() under normal circumstances. In other words, io_service.run() is still blocking, defeating the entire purpose. This obviously isn't the correct way to implement io_service and/or mainLoop(); so what is?
My apologies if this has been done thousands of times, but apparently I'm not Googling the right phrases to bring up the results I'm looking for.

Answer 1

boost::asio::buffer does not directly support creating a mutable-buffer from an std::string, mainly because they are not guaranteed to be continuous in memory pre-C++11.
The way you are call it ((void*, size_t) overload), you will let the read overwrite the internals of std::string, which leads to your segfault. You should probably use one of the other overloads in this list: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_50_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference/buffer.html - most likely one for std::vector<char>, since you can easily copy that into a string when your read returns.
Now that problem is that you need to know beforehand how many chars you want to read, since your strings are of variable length. For that, you need to async_read the length separately before your read the actual contents. Then you resize the buffer (as I said, most likely std::vector<char>) and schedule a read of that length. Note that the sender can send both together, this is only complicated for reading from a stream... To summerize:
async_read your string length into some integer of fixed length
Resize the buffer for the content read appropriately
async_read your contents
As for your second question, it is not really clear what you want, but you might want to look into io_service::poll() if you want to do your own stuff while asio is running.

Answer 2

boost::asio::buffer( &_command, sizeof(_command) ) means that you want to overwrite 4 first bytes (or whatever sizeof(string) is) of _command object, but this is obviously not what you want. If you need an auto-resizing input buffer, use asio::streambuf instead.
io_service::run blocks the calling thread, so your mainLoop won't run. You can either execute io_service::run in a separate thread, or poll io_serivce manually, interleaving calls to run_one/poll_one (see the reference) with iterations of your own application loop.