Principle

Event subscription

To react to a particular event, you first have to subscribe to it. To do so, you must first create a proxy to ALMemory, then call the subscribeToEvent method to subscribe to the desired event. If you want to stop calling the callback, use the unsubscribeToEvent method. Each event has a particular name.

To create the memory proxy, you can use the module’s broker directly instead of the IP adress (this only works if you are inside a module). You then indicate to which event you want to subscribe, and the callback function that will be called somewhere.

AL::ALMemoryProxy memProxy = AL::ALMemoryProxy(getBroker());
memProxy.subscribeToEvent("eventName", "ModuleForCallback", "callbackFunctionName");

Callback function

When subscribing to the event, you specify the callback function and the module from where it comes. This means the callback function has to be bound somewhere. You cannot give any argument to the callback function.

Thread considerations

You must be particularly careful when using a callback function. The callback function processing time could be greater than the time between two event raising. In that case, you could be trying for example to read and modify the same variable in two different threads.

To avoid that, you have to ensure that your callback function is thread-safe. To do so, you can use the critical section and mutex API provided by SoftBank Robotics, but you can also use any other programming method (for example Boost.Thread).

To use SoftBank Robotics mutex, you can use a mutex (AL::ALMutex), and a critical section. Do not forget to intialize the mutex with AL::ALMutex::createALMutex. Then, you can create critical sections in your code using this mutex as an argument:

AL::ALCriticalSection section(mutex)

The corresponding includes are <althread/almutex.h> for the mutex, and <althread/alcriticalsection.h> for the critical section.