callAll() return value

Hi gang,

so far in writing JSAMP and SAMPifying TOPCAT I've come across very little in the SAMP spec that looks (to me) like it should have been done differently, which is good.

However there's one thing which is something of an annoyance and I think maybe we should change. The callAll() hub method is defined:

     string msg-id = callAll(string msg-tag, map message)

where the msg-id is one which is passed to all of the recipients. You may recall that the sender does not in general have to examine or record the returned msg-id, but may want to use it if it needs to discuss the message with one of its recipients at a later stage
(e.g. by exchanging progress type messages corresponding to the
earlier message).

What's annoying about this is that you don't know which recipients the message was actually sent to. Given that you are using callAll (rather than notifyAll), you presumably care about getting the result(s), for instance to update some internal state, or to tell the user that messages were or were not sent successfully. But since there is no way of telling for sure how many recipients there were, you can't know when responses have been received from them all. I have found myself in application code calling getSubscribedClients() to find out which recipients will receive a message, then calling callAll() to send it, so that I can inform the user when all the responses have been received. This is (a) fiddly and (b) unreliable
(since clients may un/subscribe between the two calls).

I suggest therefore that callAll() is redefined to return a list of recipient-id values, one for each recipient to which the message was sent:

    list recipient-ids = callAll(string msg-tag, map message)

This means that you don't get the msg-id, but as noted above in most cases you don't need (or even want) this. callAll() is a bit of a convenience method in any case; in the fairly rare cases that you need to get message IDs you can use getSubscribedClients() and make call() calls to each recipient by hand at not much extra effort. I can think of various alternative schemes to this which would address the same issue in various more or less complicated ways, but I'll leave the proposal at this one unless it generates further debate. If callAll() returns a list of recipient-ids, notifyAll() could I suppose do the same, although being a notification the result would probably in most cases be discarded.

Since the return value of callAll is probably discarded at present most of the time, I doubt this change would affect any code apart from testing code which anybody may already have written.

Opinions?

I should note here that in connection with the fact that as callAll() stands a single msg-id is returned for multiple messages sent, Alasdair said earlier (7 July) that it "feels wrong". I resisted changing it at the time, but I now think his feeling was probably right.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/