Winsock & Multithreading with Activex EXE

[ordnance]

Hi CVMichael, based on my personal experience with Winsock Control and MultiThread in VB6, I think there are 2 issures need to be considered.
1. how to dynamically connect winsock events handlers?
2. can't pass requestID
Second one seems to be impossile. How about the first concern? Any ideas? Thanks.

[CVMichael]

1. how to dynamically connect winsock events handlers?

I'm not sure what you mean, can you explain a little ?

I attached a picture of how the multithreading model looks like (for my application). If you notice in my example there are 4 clients conected, and there are 5 threads. That is because there is always one thread that is listeing for a new connection, when a new client connects it stops listening, and it raises an event to the main Server EXE to create a new Thread that will listen for a new connection, and so on...

[ordnance]

Originally Posted by ordnance
1. how to dynamically connect winsock events handlers?

Well, actually I'm a newbie of VB for only a couple of weeks. I am sometimes lack of ideas in how VB programmers handle a particular issue. So sorry for not giving you a clear idea.

After reading your graph, I fully understand how you are going to do. It is workable. Please ignore my questions because now I think they are not smart. Thans for your instructions.

[Wokawidget]

This is exactly what I have for a server app.

Have you looked at my "multithreading" code?
I use this to communicate between the connections running in a seperate process and my server app.

When a connection is requested I accept the connection, and tell the server app it's been accepted (viaa my multithreading gateway code). The server then spawns another connection that listens.

woka

[CVMichael]

Hi Wokawidget, I did not look at your code, and I don't think I will, I did it before, and I got scared You use WAY to many classes/objects/files, etc. I don't want to go through that again

I read the comments in the thread where you describe the code, and I got an idea on how you did it.

The way I did mine is like this:

Thread (ActiveX EXE):
----------------
1) A form where I put a timer, and a Winsock, both of them raise events to the thread class
2) The thread class, that raises events for ANY changes in data that Main EXE needs (i.e. Client info/status, connection status, database connection status)

Main EXE:
----------------
1) A UserControl that creates one Thread, receives it's events, stores the info, and raises/forwards events to main EXE
2) Main form, has a control array of the UserControl (This way I treat the UserControl as if it was a Thread, except I can call functions/subs from it even when the real thread is busy with something)



Also, I re-use threads (same as winsock array), when I get an event from the thread to create another thread (because current one is not listening anymore), I actually search through the UserControl array to find wich thread is not doing anything (not connected to a client), and THEN I call a funtion in that thread telling it to listen.
If all threads are busy then I create a new thread. (As I was saying same as winsock array)

[Wokawidget]

Can you post a snippet of code on how you loop through all the connections and test to see if they are not connected...
Is it something like:

'modular level var
Private mcolItems As Collection
 
'code in function
Dim objConn As SckConnection
   For Each objConn In mcolItems
      If objConn.IsConnected Then
         'code to connect objconn
      End If
   Next objConn

Is it something like the above?

Woka

[CVMichael]

This is the actual code in my app...

CConnection is the usercontrol that makes the thread

Private Sub CConnection_MakeNewThread(Index As Integer)
    Dim K As Long, clsErr As clsReturnError, Listening As Boolean
    
    LoadDBSettings
    
    For K = 0 To CConnection.UBound
        If CConnection(K).ClientSocketState = sckListening Then
            Listening = True
            Exit For
        End If
    Next K
    
    If Not Listening Then
        For K = 0 To CConnection.UBound
            If CConnection(K).ClientSocketState = sckClosed Then Exit For
        Next K
        
        If K = CConnection.UBound + 1 Then Load CConnection(K)
        
        Set clsErr = CConnection(K).StartThread(TCP_LocalPort, m_DatabaseName, m_DriverStr, m_UserName, m_Password)
    End If
End Sub

As you can see it creates a new thread ONLY when ALL threads are used, otherwise it will start the thread that has a closed connection