The Dynamic Skeleton Interface (or DSI) allows applications to provide implementations of the operations on CORBA objects without static knowledge of the object's interface. It is the server-side equivalent of the Dynamic Invocation Interface.
This chapter presents the Dynamic Skeleton Interface and explains how to use it. An toy example use of the DSI can be found in the omniORB2 distribution in the <top>/src/examples/dsi directory. For further information refer to the Dynamic Skeleton Interface and C++ Mapping sections of the CORBA 2 specification [OMG99a].
The DSI interface has changed in CORBA 2.3. The implementation described below conforms to CORBA 2.1 or 2.2.
When an ORB receives an invocation request, the information includes the object reference and the name of the operation. Typically this information is used by the ORB to select an instance of an object and call into the implementation of the operation (which knows how to unmarshal the parameters etc.). The Dynamic Skeleton Interface however makes this information directly available to the application - so that it can implement the operation (or pass it on to another server) without static knowledge of the interface. In fact it is not even necessary for the server to always implement the same interface on any particular object!
To provide an implementation for one or more objects an application must sub-class DynamicImplementation and override the method invoke(). An instance of this class is registered with the BOA and is assigned an object reference (see below). When the ORB receives a request for that object the invoke() method is called and will be passed a ServerRequest object which provides:
This class must be sub-classed by the application to provide an implementation for DSI objects. The method invoke() will be called for each operation invocation.
namespace CORBA {
...
class BOA {
...
class DynamicImplementation {
public:
DynamicImplementation();
virtual ~DynamicImplementation();
virtual void invoke(ServerRequest_ptr request,
Environment& env) throw() = 0;
protected:
Object_ptr _this();
// Must only be called from within invoke(). Caller must release
// the reference returned.
BOA_ptr _boa();
// Must only be called from within invoke(). Caller must NOT
// release the reference returned.
};
...
};
...
};
A ServerRequest object provides the interface between a dynamic implementation and the ORB.
namespace CORBA {
...
class ServerRequest {
public:
virtual const char* op_name();
virtual OperationDef_ptr op_def();
virtual Context_ptr ctx();
virtual void params(NVList_ptr parameters);
virtual void result(Any* value);
virtual void exception(Any* value);
static ServerRequest_ptr _duplicate(ServerRequest_ptr);
static ServerRequest_ptr _nil();
};
...
};
The application must override the invoke() method of DynamicImplementation to provide an implementation for DSI objects. This method must behave as follows:
op_name() will return the name of the operation, and may be called at any time. For attribute access the operation name is the IDL name of the attribute, prefixed by _get_ or _set_. If the operation name is not recognised a CORBA::BAD_OPERATION exception should be passed back through env. This will allow the ORB to then see if it is one of the standard object operations.
Firstly params() must be called passing a CORBA::NVList
which must be initialised to contain the type and mode of the parameters. The ORB consumes this value and will release it when the operation is complete. At this point any in/inout arguments will be unmarshalled, and when this operation returns their values will be in the NVList. The application may set the value of inout/out arguments by modifying this parameter list.
If the operation has user-context information, then ctx() must be called after params() to retrieve it.
result() must then be called exactly once if the operation has a non-void return value (unless an exception is thrown). The value passed should be an Any allocated with new, and will be freed by the ORB.
At any point in the above sequence exception() may be called to set a user-defined exception or a system exception. If this happens then no further operations should be invoked on the ServerRequest object, and the invoke() method should return.
Within the invoke() method _this() and _boa() may be called to obtain the object reference and BOA reference respectively. These methods may not be used at any other time.
To use a DynamicImplementation a CORBA object must be created and associated with the implementation. The way in which this is done is not defined by the CORBA 2.0 specification, so the following method is omniORB2 specific:
namespace CORBA {
...
class BOA {
...
Object_ptr create_dynamic_object(DynamicImplementation_ptr dir,
const char* intfRepoId);
...
};
...
};
Ownership of the DynamicImplementation object is taken over by the ORB, and it will be deleted when associated the object is destroyed. The returned object may then be entered into the object table with a call to BOA::obj_is_ready() as usual, and will then start accepting operation invocations.
For some applications it will not be possible to register all DSI objects in advance of invocations arriving. In this case DSI objects can be created on demand in the same way as normal objects - see section 5.6.
This implementation of DynamicImplementation::invoke() is taken from an example which can be found in the omniORB2 distribution. The operation ``echoString'' is declared in IDL as:
string echoString(in string mesg);
Here is the Dynamic Implementation Routine:
void
MyDynImpl::invoke(CORBA::ServerRequest_ptr request, CORBA::Environment& env)
throw()
{
try {
if( strcmp(request->op_name(), "echoString") )
throw CORBA::BAD_OPERATION(0, CORBA::COMPLETED_NO);
CORBA::NVList_ptr args;
orb->create_list(0, args);
CORBA::Any a;
a.replace(CORBA::_tc_string, 0);
args->add_value("", a, CORBA::ARG_IN);
request->params(args);
CORBA::Any& input_any = *(args->item(0)->value());
CORBA::String_var input;
input_any >>= input.out();
CORBA::Any* result = new CORBA::Any();
*result <<= CORBA::Any::from_string(input._retn(), 0);
request->result(result);
}
catch(CORBA::Exception& ex) {
CORBA::Any* v = new CORBA::Any;
::operator<<=(*v,ex);
request->exception(v);
}
// In pre-omniORB 2.8.0, one has to do this:
// catch(CORBA::SystemException& ex){
// env.exception(CORBA::Exception::_duplicate(&ex));
// }
catch(...){
cout << "echo_dsiimpl: MyDynImpl::invoke - caught an"
" unknown exception." << endl;
env.exception(new CORBA::UNKNOWN(0, CORBA::COMPLETED_NO));
}
}