Question

I’m working on a general server and a client programs. The problem I’m facing is when I’m in the OnDataReceived in my client and server I don’t know what to do with the data. Ideally it should output the received data into a window but I don’t know if it will be a Form or Console application. So the question is how do I create a general method that can handle both or if that is not possible what should I do instead?

The code I’m working with:

            SocketPacket theSockId = (SocketPacket)asyn.AsyncState;

            int iRx = theSockId.m_currentSocket.EndReceive(asyn);
            char[] chars = new char[iRx + 1];
            Decoder decode = Encoding.Default.GetDecoder();
            int charLength = decode.GetChars(theSockId.dataBuffer, 0, iRx, chars, 0);
            String szData = new String(chars);

            //Handle Message here

            WaitForData();

And the socket packet class:

    class SocketPacket
    {
     public Socket m_currentSocket;
     public byte[] dataBuffer = new byte[1024];//Buffer to store the data by the client

     public SocketPacket(Socket socket)
     {
        m_currentSocket = socket;
     }
    }

PS.
I don’t know if needs to be known but I’m doing asynchronous Client/Server.

Answer 1

Your communication classes shouldn’t care what happens to the data they receive. Instead, they should either make the data available to a class that wants it. One way to do so would be to provide a getData() method, which received data and then returned it to the caller. Even better would be to provide a DataArrived event, which was fired whenever you received data. That way, any number of consumers could listen for data, but your communication code doesn`t have to know which classes are listening or what they plan to do with the data.

EDIT:

A simple example:

public class MyClassWithEvent
{
    public delegate void DataArrivedDelegate(string data);
    public event DataArrivedDelegate DataArrived;

    public void GetSomeData()
    {
        // Communication code goes here; stringData has the data

        DataArrivedDelegate handler = DataArrived;
        if (handler != null)
        {
            // If you want to raise the event on this thread, this is fine
            handler(stringData);
        }
    }
}

In your listener class:

public MyListener
{

    public MyListener(MyServer server)
    {
        // Sets MyListenerMethod to be called when DataArrived is raised
        server.DataArrived += MyListenerMethod;
    }

    public void MyListenerMethod(string data)
    {
        // Do something with the data
        Console.WriteLine(data);
    }
}