Week 32 contribution of PDK documentation content. See release notes for details. Fixes bug Bug 3582
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<concept id="GUID-E634E701-0DA2-572E-852B-8A1F88F05E5A" xml:lang="en"><title>Notifier
framework</title><shortdesc>This document describes the notifier framework.</shortdesc><prolog><metadata><keywords/></metadata></prolog><conbody>
<section id="GUID-CED154FC-CFBE-5E07-843B-D409660C5816"><title>The framework</title> <p>The
text window server notifier framework is a system that loads plug-in DLLs
from <filepath>\sys\bin\tnotifiers</filepath>. </p> <p>It is used only in
test ROMs and is never used in production code. For production code, use the
Extended Notifier Framework. The architecture of both frameworks is identical;
however, the interface classes have different names. </p> <p>These DLLs are
expected to export a single factory function at ordinal #1 that returns an
array of notifiers. A special notifier target type is supported by makmake.
The second Uid for notifiers should be 0x10005522. </p> <p>The behaviour of
notifiers is supplied by providing an implementation of the <xref href="GUID-E2C0E005-4138-3C2A-839C-ADB9C935F64B.dita"><apiname>MNotifierBase</apiname></xref> interface.
A notifier is associated with a channel and a priority. Priority is used to
determine the order of activation if more than one notifier is activated at
any time. Priority only affects notifiers on the same channel (e.g. a screen
or LED). This means that two notifiers can be active at the same time provided
that they are on different channels. </p> <p>The channel and priority used
by all the notifiers in the system needs to be considered carefully to avoid
them interfering with each other in unexpected ways. The <xref href="GUID-E2C0E005-4138-3C2A-839C-ADB9C935F64B.dita"><apiname>MNotifierBase</apiname></xref> derived
class also needs to be implemented correctly. Text window server notifiers
run in the window server thread and are accessed on the client side via <xref href="GUID-A6B66713-FECA-3BE7-BB81-1AE5551AD83D.dita"><apiname>RNotifier</apiname></xref>.
Note that if a notifier panics it will lead to a device reset. </p> </section>
<section id="GUID-DA49D735-4C8E-5EFD-A170-5E5A23D30884"><title>The factory
function</title> <p>The factory function at ordinal #1 is expected to return
an array of notifiers. The following is a typical implementation: </p> <codeblock id="GUID-389A6F11-4700-5423-B7CA-B8F5F0E4391D" xml:space="preserve">EXPORT_C CArrayPtr<MNotifierBase>* NotifierArray()
{
CArrayPtrFlat<MNotifierBase>* notifiers=new CArrayPtrFlat<MNotifierBase>(5);
if (notifiers)
{
TRAPD(err, CreateNotifiersL(notifiers));
if(err)
{
TInt count = notifiers->Count();
while(count--)
{
(*notifiers)[count]->Release();
}
delete notifiers;
notifiers = NULL;
}
}
return(notifiers);
}
</codeblock> <p>Note that ownership of the notifier array or its contents
is not transferred to the framework until this function returns. To avoid
memory leaks, all acquired resources must be freed if anything goes wrong
part of the way through its processing. </p> <p>Calling <codeph>Release()</codeph> on
a notifier should cause that notifier to free all of its resources, and as
a minimum should call <codeph>delete this;</codeph>. See <xref href="GUID-E2C0E005-4138-3C2A-839C-ADB9C935F64B.dita#GUID-E2C0E005-4138-3C2A-839C-ADB9C935F64B/GUID-ADFAC896-1888-3BFF-9335-1CF83B9726A4"><apiname>MNotifierBase::Release()</apiname></xref>. </p> <p>Returning
a <codeph>Null</codeph> value from this function causes the framework to leave
with <xref href="GUID-64F6761A-4716-37C3-8984-FF18FC8B7B7D.dita"><apiname>KErrNoMemory</apiname></xref>. </p> <p>The <codeph>CreateNotifiersL()</codeph> function
should be implemented as follows: </p> <codeblock id="GUID-3CC86675-ECC5-59E4-8CD3-86AD0BAE0B90" xml:space="preserve">LOCAL_C void CreateNotifiersL(CArrayPtrFlat<MNotifierBase>* aNotifiers)
{
MNotifierBase* notifier;
notifier = CMyNotifierA::NewL();
CleanupStack::PushL(notifier);
aNotifiers->AppendL(notifier);
CleanupStack::Pop(notifier);
...
...
// typically, repeat this procedure for as
// many notifiers as are implemented
// in the plug-in DLL.
}</codeblock> <p>Note the use of the standard Symbian platform technique
of using the cleanup stack to hold pointers to allocated objects for as long
as these objects have no owner; this prevents memory leaks. For this reason,
avoid using a technique such as <codeph>aNotifiers->AppendL(CMyNotifierA::NewL());</codeph>,
which, although shorter, will result in a memory leak if the <codeph>AppendL()</codeph> operation
fails. </p> </section>
</conbody></concept>