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/****************************************************************************
**
** Copyright (C) 2011 - 2012 Denis Shienkov <denis.shienkov@gmail.com>
** Contact: http://www.qt-project.org/legal
**
** This file is part of the documentation of the Qt Toolkit.
**
** $QT_BEGIN_LICENSE:FDL$
** Commercial License Usage
** Licensees holding valid commercial Qt licenses may use this file in
** accordance with the commercial license agreement provided with the
** Software or, alternatively, in accordance with the terms contained in
** a written agreement between you and Digia. For licensing terms and
** conditions see http://qt.digia.com/licensing. For further information
** use the contact form at http://qt.digia.com/contact-us.
**
** GNU Free Documentation License Usage
** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Free
** Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software
** Foundation and appearing in the file included in the packaging of
** this file. Please review the following information to ensure
** the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 requirements
** will be met: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
** $QT_END_LICENSE$
**
****************************************************************************/
/*!
\example blockingmaster
\title Blocking Master Example
\ingroup qtserialport-examples
The Blocking Master example shows how to create a application for a
serial interface using QSerialPort's synchronous API in a non-GUI thread.
\image blockingmaster-example.png Screenshot of the Blocking Master example
QSerialPort supports two general programming approaches:
\list
\li \e{The asynchronous (non-blocking) approach.} Operations are scheduled
and performed when the control returns to Qt's event loop. QSerialPort emits
a signal when the operation is finished. For example, QSerialPort::write()
returns immediately. When the data is sent to the serial port, QSerialPort
emits \l{QSerialPort::bytesWritten()}{bytesWritten()}.
\li \e{The synchronous (blocking) approach.} In non-GUI and multithreaded
applications, the \c waitFor...() functions can be called (i.e.
QSerialPort::waitReadyRead()) to suspend the calling thread until the
operation has completed.
\endlist
In this example, the synchronous approach is demonstrated. The
\l{examples/terminal}{Simple Terminal} example illustrates the
asynchronous approach.
The purpose of this example is to demonstrate a pattern that you can use
to simplify your serial programming code, without losing responsiveness
in your user interface. Use of Qt's blocking serial programming API often
leads to simpler code, but because of its blocking behavior, it should only
be used in non-GUI threads to prevent the user interface from freezing.
But contrary to what many think, using threads with QThread does not
necessarily add unmanagable complexity to your application.
This application is a Master, that demonstrate the work paired with Slave
application \l{examples/blockingslave}{Blocking Slave Example}.
The Master application is initiate the transfer request via serial port to
the Slave application and wait for a response from it.
We will start with the MasterThread class, which handles the serial
programming code.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.h 0
MasterThread is a QThread subclass that provides an API for scheduling
requests to Slave, and it has signals for delivering responses and reporting
errors. You can call transaction() to startup new master transaction with
desired request data and other parameters, and the result is delivered by
the response() signal. If any error occurs, the error() or timeout() signals
is emitted.
It's important to notice that transaction() is called from the main, GUI
thread, but the request data and other parameters will be accessed from
MasterThread's thread. Because we will be reading and writing MasterThread's
data members from different threads concurrently, we use QMutex to
synchronize access.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 2
The transaction() function stores the serial port name, timeout and request
data, and we lock the mutex with QMutexLocker to protect this data. We then
start the thread, unless it is already running. We will come back to the
QWaitCondition::wakeOne() call later.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 4
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 5
In the run() function, we start by acquiring the mutex lock, fetching the
serial port name, timeout and request data from the member data, and then
releasing the lock again. The case that we are protecting ourselves against
is that \c transaction() could be called at the same time as we are fetching
this data. QString is \l reentrant but \e not \l{thread-safe}, and we must
also avoid the unlikely risk of reading the serial port name from one request,
and timeout or request data of another. And as you might have guessed,
MasterThread can only handle one request at a time.
The QSerialPort object we construct on stack into run() function before loop
enter:
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 6
This allows us once to create an object, while running loop, and also means
that all the methods of the object will be executed in the context of the
run() thread.
In the loop, we check for changed or not the name of serial port for the
current transaction. And if the name is changed then re-open and re-configure
the serial port.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 7
The loop will continue creating request data, write to serial port and wait
until all data is transferred.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 8
\warning The method waitForBytesWritten() should be used after each write()
call for the blocking approach, because it processes all the I/O routines
instead of Qt event-loop.
The timeout() signal is emitted if error occurs when transferring data.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 9
After a successful request, we start wait until response and try read it.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 10
\warning The method waitForReadyRead() should be used before each read()
call for the blocking approach, because it processes all the I/O routines
instead of Qt event-loop.
The timeout() signal is emitted if error occurs when receiving data.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 11
After a successful transaction is emitted response() signal containing the
data received from the Slave application:
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 12
Next, the thread goes to sleep until the next transaction is appear. On
waking, the thread re-reads the new data of members and run loop from the
beginning.
\snippet blockingmaster/masterthread.cpp 13
\sa {Simple Terminal Example}, {Blocking Slave Example}
*/
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