[Twisted-Python] how to get an idle callback while running a reactor?

Joe Strout joe at strout.net
Sat Dec 20 10:28:20 EST 2008


Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:

>> So I'm at a loss as to how to add an "idle" function that will allow 
>> my bot to periodically see whether it has something new to say to the 
>> user.
> 
> While this sometimes makes sense, it's usually *not* the approach you want
> to take.  You're describing a solution which is essentially polling.  And
> polling is not as good as responding to events.  You *could* run a function
> ten times a second that looks around for a message to send and sends it if
> it finds one.  Or, whatever event occurs which creates those messages could
> just send the message instead of putting it in a pile and waiting for your
> poller to find it.

Well, the thing is that there will actually be a great many things that 
could cause it to need to send a message, such as the time, a change in 
the outside temperature, a certain change in the value of a stock fund, 
etc.  And the AIM interface isn't the only interface to this bot.  So I 
really do think I need a way to call a function once every few seconds.

Now, that does suggest an alternative approach, which is to ignore 
twisted's event/idle mechanisms and use something external to it.  But 
I'm also fairly newish to Python, so I'm not sure exactly how to do that 
either -- reactor.run() is a blocking call, so I supposed I'd have to 
use threads.  Then my "idler thread" could call the idle function, sleep 
for a few seconds, and repeat.

But if there's a simple way to do this within Twisted, I'd like to learn 
what that is
.
>> Now, from trawling the docs, I guess that I want to call 
>> reactor.callWhenRunning...
> 
> Probably not.  If you want to run a function later (and that's how polling
> is generally implemented), you want reactor.callLater.  If you want to run
> a function repeatedly at a fixed interval, 
> twisted.internet.task.LoopingCall will help.

Thanks, I'll look at these.

> You'll probably encounter the same problem with reactor.callLater as you
> were encountering with reactor.callWhenRunning, though.  How do you get
> a reference to the bound method to pass in?  That's simple - don't call
> the reactor method until you *have* an instance.  You can call almost any
> reactor method even *after* the reactor is started; you do not have to set
> everything up before you call reactor.run.

OK, so somewhere within my B class, maybe in initDone, set it up there? 
    That makes sense.

Thanks,
- Joe





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