METHODS

emit($message)

A task uses this to send a message to the Router.

The idea is to never address messages directly to tasks; each task should only 'blindly' emit messages, and leave the decisions about delivery and transformations to the Router.

You can over-ride this method in a task; just be sure to call the emit method in the Task class in order to send messages.

This method sets the following fields on the message, automatically:

source

This field contains the name of the task that called emit

previous_source

This field contains the previous value of the source field

Example:

$self->emit({something => 'important'});

is_stateful

This method is called by the MultiModule daemon to determine if your task is stateful. is_stateful() returns 'false' in this class. Override in your task to return some true value if you want MultiModule to maintain your state.

Example:

sub is_stateful {
   return 'yes';
}

set_config($config)

This method is called by the MultiModule daemon when it has updated config for your task. The default behaviour (as implemented in the Task class) is to simply take the passed config and assign it to the 'config' field on the $self reference.

The other important purpose of this method is to give your task a chance to setup various POE events.

If your task needs to, for instance, follow logfiles, that setup should happen in this method.

This method is re-called every time the underlying config changes. So whatever setup that was done in an initial process-space invocation of this should probably be re-considered in future calls, since the setup was likely controlled by the config, and future calls have differences in the config.

It is important to be mindful of this flow; it would be easy to leak descriptors and/or resources over various calls to set_config().

Concretely, if an initial process-space call to this method setup a POE event to watch a file /var/log/some_file.log, as defined in the passed config, and a later call did not have any reference to following /var/log/some_file.log, it is expected that the POE event associated with /var/log/some_file.log would be deallocated.

Example: (copied from lib/MultiModuleTest/Example1.pm in this distribution)

sub set_config {
   my $self = shift;
   my $config = shift;
   $self->{config} = $config;
   $self->{state} = { ct => 0 } unless $self->{state};
   $self->named_recur(  #See perldoc App::MultiModule::Core
       recur_name => 'Example1',
       repeat_interval => 1, #runs every second
       work => sub {
           my $message = {
               ct => $self->{state}->{ct}++,
               outstr => $config->{outstr},
           };
           $self->emit($message);
       },
   }
}