Re: [pysystray-users] Threads and "global variable"

[Essien I. E. <es...@da...>]

Christian Keydel wrote:
> Thank you Essien for this great tool!
>   
Thanks for the compliment :)

Unfortunately, I no more work at a Windows shop so I don't have the need 
to improve it much... mayhap someone else may be interested in doing 
this incrementally? At least fixing bugs that crop up in real world 
scenarios?  *hint*  *hint* at Greg @ bittorrent ;)
> I am stuck at what seems like a simple thing: I have spawned one thread 
> automatically on load of the taskbar icon. That was easy. Now I need 
> this thread to change it's behaviour depending on what menu items I 
> selected. I have a global variable that each menu item can set, but the 
> thread doesn't see it.
>
> After what I could google on it it seems the threads run in their own 
> space. I found some examples for communication between threads but only 
> for class-threads and not the type function-thread that pysystray uses, 
> plus it seems complicated.
>   
Indeed threads can't communicate via 'global' anythings really, unless 
via some complex mechanisms... Windows I think builds up that frame work 
for threads into a message passing system i think. must have read that 
somewhere.
> What is the most simplistic approach to change a parameter "globally" so 
> that the thread can see it? I tried a get_val() function but that 
> doesn't work either and the thread always sees 0.
>   

The way I see, it, what you could do would be to use sockets. On UNIX i 
would say use socket.AF_LOCAL but in windows, you can just use the 
normal INET sockets.

It seems to me that your on_load thread is the main thread that others 
can control no? In that case, you can make it a server, that listens for 
values from clients. Then each of your menu items will do a simple 
socket.socket(), connect(), send(). The server picks up the message and 
works with it.

You can make this all simple by building a simple module to abstract the 
client messages, so you could have:


foobar.client_send(foobar.COOL_VALUE)

then in the server you could do,

while 1:
    msg = foobar_server.get_msg()
    if msg == foobar.COOL_VALUE:
       #meh
    if msg == foobar.UNCOOL_VALUE:
       #more meh!

that's the way I would do it :)

Hope that helps.

> Cheers,
> Chris
>
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