Group: Allow connections to be added or removed on-the-fly

[Savageman]

Currently if we merge connections after the run, they don't seem to be listened.

[Hywan]

Please, explain how do you do that :-). I reckon this is not possible but I woud like to know how do you run and add at the same time.

[Savageman]

Currently it's not possible with Hoa, it's a feature request: I'd like to be able to do it :)

[Hywan]

Removing is hard because connections are “merged”, but this is still possible to undo this

Socket/Connection/Handler.php

Lines 205 to 229 in 5b136b1

	/**
	* Merge a connection into this one.
	* If we have two connections that must run at the same time, the
	* Hoa\Socket\Connection::consider() and Hoa\Socket\Connection::is() methods
	* are helpful but this whole class eases the merge of “high-level”
	* connections.
	*
	* @param \Hoa\Socket\Connection\Handler $other Connection to merge.
	* @return \Hoa\Socket\Connection\Handler
	*/
	public function merge(self $other)
	{
	$thisConnection = $this->getConnection();
	$otherConnection = $other->getConnection();
	$thisConnection->consider($otherConnection);
	if ($otherConnection instanceof Socket\Server) {
	$other->setConnection($thisConnection);
	}
	$this->_connections[] = $other;
	return $this;
	}

and this https://github.com/hoaproject/Socket/blob/master/Server.php#L364-L392 (this one is difficult) and https://github.com/hoaproject/Socket/blob/master/Client.php#L246-L272.

Adding should already work I think.

Why would you like to remove a connection? If you close it, it's OK, isn't it? I understand your needs, I am just looking for a workaround.

[Savageman]

Maybe the Connection\Group is designed weirdly. It looks like Connection classes (both Client and Server) have code to manage multiple connections with consider(). Maybe this is too much responsibility and it would be easier to isolate this part into the Connection\Handler class only?

[Hywan]

Nop. Actually, the design seems weird because of the select API. We have to merge connections into a single one, this is why a connection must consider/be aware of another one. Adding a connection at runtime is easy I think, but removing one would require several tests and could cause many data races (a lot of null value). This is a long time development. I will modify my planning to find a period to work on this feature. Not sure I could provide it in the next months. Is it urgent?

[Savageman]

No, don't bother it's not urgent. We already developed our system with another library, but we were evaluating other libraries to migrate (the one we use it's not working with PHP 7).