Netty - How to get server response in the client

Question

I\'m mostly there with Netty but one concept is still alluding me, and I can\'t find anything in the tutorials and so on. Firstly I do understand that Netty is asynchronous,

Answer 1

You have to handle it in the Handler with messageReceived(). I'm not sure what your issue is exactly. My guess is you have a response to a request that changes depending on what request was made? Maybe a concrete description of something you are doing of a response that has to know what request it came from. One thing you might be able to do is to pass a long living object the handler that knows the outstanding request, and it can match up the response when it receives it. The pipeline factory method can pass a reference to a manager type object to the Handler.

This was pretty much what I was trying to say. Your Handler is created in the PipelineFactory which is easy to pass parameters to the Handler from there:

    bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(new ChannelPipelineFactory() {
        public ChannelPipeline getPipeline() throws Exception {
            ChannelPipeline pipeline = Channels.pipeline();

            pipeline.addLast("framer", new DelimiterBasedFrameDecoder(8192, Delimiters.nulDelimiter()));
            pipeline.addLast("decoder", new XMLDecoder() );
            pipeline.addLast("encoder", new XMLEncoder() );
            // notice here I'm passing two objects to the Handler so it can 
            // call the UI.
            pipeline.addLast("handler", new MyHandler(param1, param2)); 

            return pipeline;
        }
    });

When you create your pipeline you'll add your Handler upon a new connection. Simply pass one or more objects that allows it to communicate back to the UI or a controller.

Answer 2

Jestan is correct. In my case I have a client that need to process price tick data. I use Antlr for the parsing. I fire my events in my parser, but in my case my protocol is String based. Below is an example without Antlr, I pass the String message in your case it could be the users.

//----------------- Event --------------
public class DataChangeEvent {
    private String message;

    public DataChangeEvent(String message) {
        this.message = message;
    }

    public String getMessage() {
        return message;
    }


}

//----------------- Listener --------------
public interface DataChangeListenter {
    public void dataChangeEvent(DataChangeEvent event);
}

//----------------- Event Handler that fires the dataChange events --------------
// This class needs to be static since you need to register all your classes that want to be notified of data change events
public class DataChangedHandler {
    private static List<DataChangeListenter> listeners = new ArrayList<DataChangeListenter>();

    public static void registerDataChangeListener(DataChangeListenter listener) {
        listeners.add(listener);
    }

    public static void fireDataChange(DataChangeEvent dataChangeEvent) {
        for(DataChangeListenter listenter : listeners) {
            listenter.dataChangeEvent(dataChangeEvent);
        }
    }
}

//----------------- Example class that implements the listener and registers itself for events --------------
public class ProcessMessage implements DataChangeListenter {

    public ProcessMessage() {
        DataChangedHandler.registerDataChangeListener(this);
    }

    public void dataChangeEvent(DataChangeEvent event) {
        //Depending on your protocal, I use Antlr to parse my message
        System.out.println(event.getMessage());
    }


}

//---------------- Netty Handler -----------
public class TelnetClientHandler extends SimpleChannelHandler {

    private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(TelnetClientHandler.class.getName());

    @Override
    public void messageReceived(ChannelHandlerContext ctx, MessageEvent e) {
        String message = (String) e.getMessage();
        DataChangedHandler.fireDataChange(message);
    }
}