Hi everyone - I’ve always thought the article on announcements many
years ago was very cool - and we don’t seem to use them as much as we
could (but equally they aren’t a panacea to be overused everywhere
either - and they do get used in Pharo to some extent).

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with CodeParadise (CP is a very cool
project, and Erik is very supportive and thinking about how to write
web apps a different way… I’m fascinated),

And - CP uses announcements as mechanism to send events from the View
Client (in a web browser) to a Presenter on the server (which makes
total sense).

In taking things for a spin, I hit an interesting problem on how in a
web component world, you should display a spelling test of words -

e.g. SpellingTest — has many —> SpellingWord(s).

Initially I bunged it all in a single presenter with its associated
view, and it was a bit messy, and Erik guided me down a route (that CP
nicely supports) - that my SpellingTest view should have the name/date
of the test as well as an add word input field, but the list of current
Words (which I had bunged into a table) - were actually more elegant as
sub-components - hence a WordView - which renders a single word in a
DIV, and for the edit screen I was creating, a Delete button next to
the word (so you could delete it). So a 1 to many relationship
essentials.

This is where the announcements kick in (and lead to my ultimate question).

When you click the Delete button, if I use a sub component - my view
will generate a DeleteWordAnnouncement - which gets fed to my
SpellingWordPresenter - however words in this sense don’t naturally
know their parent (the SpellingTest) - and its the parent test that has
a #deleteWord: method.

I’ve been taking with Erik, on different ways to elegantly handle this.

a) you could change the model so words know their parent (in my case,
I’m using a 3rd party model for Flashcards, and they just don’t know
this - and adapting them would be a nuisance
b) my TestPresenter could listen to announcements on the WordPresenter

• and I could get some communications between presenters (although
  normally the Presenters just get events from Views, and pure domain
  models - so it feels a bit abnormal to consider another Presenter as a
  sort of model - but I could live with this
  c) given the composable nature of views/presenters (and CP is base on a
  WebComponent model) - you could bubble up Announcements, so that if an
  event isn’t handled by a view’s immediate presenter, you could re-route
  it to the parent of the View (the component owner) and see if it’s
  presenter could do something.

I think (c) has a certain expectation to it - in fact when I converted
my initial one-presenter attempt into components, I still had listener
code in my TestPresenter that was expecting to get a deleteWord
announcement and I was initially surprised that I wasn’t getting it (as
it was now just going to the Word component I had refactored out).

So I wonder if others here would expect things to work this way too
(and are there other examples in the wild that lead you here - or scare
you away from this?).

Back to  my Announcement question - if C is a good idea - why doesn’t
the Announcer class let you check if if will handle a particular
announcement? The API has  #hasSubscriber: and #hasSubscriberClass: ,
but its missing:

hasSubscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement
"Answer true if I have any subcribers to anAnnouncement"

^(registry subscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement ) notEmpty 

And I am wondering if this is because it's a bad thing to expect to be
able to check? In my case above, I would want to do this to know if CP
should instead try announcing a message to a parent presenter because
the current presenter won’t handle it.  In my example above, my
WordComponentView will broadcast that the delete button was clicked,
but its actually a parent view which would reasonably want to listen to
this kind of event and process the delete.  And in a many words
scenario (the Test has many words), its unrealistic for the parent to
register to listen to each word component individually (in fact CP sort
of hides this from you), however if you could listen to an event in
your TestView, it seems to come out quite nicely  - and looks a bit
like this:

viewCreated
super viewCreated.

self view
	when: CpNavigationAnnouncement
		do: [ :action | self model goto: action location ];
		
	when: CpAddWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self addWord: action data 

];
when: CpDeleteWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self deleteWord:
action data ]. <— this is the one I’m talking about

So I’m curious on the overall thought process here, but in particular
whether I should even submit a PR on Announcer for
#hasSubscriptionsHandling: ?

Tim

The whole idea is to decouple producers and consumers, like in
messaging systems.

You should not care if there are other listening, just like the
listeners should not care if there is someone posting data.

Asking for subscribers is introducing a coupling.

The announcement mechanism will/should deal with this in an efficient way.

On 27 Apr 2021, at 16:03, Tim Mackinnon tim@testit.works wrote:

From my rather long ramble below - I am still curious if its distasteful to have a method on Announcer

hasSubscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement
"Answer true if I have any subscribers to anAnnouncement"

^(registry subscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement ) notEmpty

Tim

On Thu, 22 Apr 2021, at 11:34 PM, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

Hi everyone - I’ve always thought the article on announcements many
years ago was very cool - and we don’t seem to use them as much as we
could (but equally they aren’t a panacea to be overused everywhere
either - and they do get used in Pharo to some extent).

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with CodeParadise (CP is a very cool
project, and Erik is very supportive and thinking about how to write
web apps a different way… I’m fascinated),

And - CP uses announcements as mechanism to send events from the View
Client (in a web browser) to a Presenter on the server (which makes
total sense).

In taking things for a spin, I hit an interesting problem on how in a
web component world, you should display a spelling test of words -

e.g. SpellingTest — has many —> SpellingWord(s).

Initially I bunged it all in a single presenter with its associated
view, and it was a bit messy, and Erik guided me down a route (that CP
nicely supports) - that my SpellingTest view should have the name/date
of the test as well as an add word input field, but the list of current
Words (which I had bunged into a table) - were actually more elegant as
sub-components - hence a WordView - which renders a single word in a
DIV, and for the edit screen I was creating, a Delete button next to
the word (so you could delete it). So a 1 to many relationship
essentials.

This is where the announcements kick in (and lead to my ultimate question).

When you click the Delete button, if I use a sub component - my view
will generate a DeleteWordAnnouncement - which gets fed to my
SpellingWordPresenter - however words in this sense don’t naturally
know their parent (the SpellingTest) - and its the parent test that has
a #deleteWord: method.

I’ve been taking with Erik, on different ways to elegantly handle this.

a) you could change the model so words know their parent (in my case,
I’m using a 3rd party model for Flashcards, and they just don’t know
this - and adapting them would be a nuisance
b) my TestPresenter could listen to announcements on the WordPresenter

• and I could get some communications between presenters (although
  normally the Presenters just get events from Views, and pure domain
  models - so it feels a bit abnormal to consider another Presenter as a
  sort of model - but I could live with this
  c) given the composable nature of views/presenters (and CP is base on a
  WebComponent model) - you could bubble up Announcements, so that if an
  event isn’t handled by a view’s immediate presenter, you could re-route
  it to the parent of the View (the component owner) and see if it’s
  presenter could do something.

I think (c) has a certain expectation to it - in fact when I converted
my initial one-presenter attempt into components, I still had listener
code in my TestPresenter that was expecting to get a deleteWord
announcement and I was initially surprised that I wasn’t getting it (as
it was now just going to the Word component I had refactored out).

So I wonder if others here would expect things to work this way too
(and are there other examples in the wild that lead you here - or scare
you away from this?).

Back to  my Announcement question - if C is a good idea - why doesn’t
the Announcer class let you check if if will handle a particular
announcement? The API has  #hasSubscriber: and #hasSubscriberClass: ,
but its missing:

hasSubscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement
"Answer true if I have any subcribers to anAnnouncement"

^(registry subscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement ) notEmpty 

And I am wondering if this is because it's a bad thing to expect to be
able to check? In my case above, I would want to do this to know if CP
should instead try announcing a message to a parent presenter because
the current presenter won’t handle it.  In my example above, my
WordComponentView will broadcast that the delete button was clicked,
but its actually a parent view which would reasonably want to listen to
this kind of event and process the delete.  And in a many words
scenario (the Test has many words), its unrealistic for the parent to
register to listen to each word component individually (in fact CP sort
of hides this from you), however if you could listen to an event in
your TestView, it seems to come out quite nicely  - and looks a bit
like this:

viewCreated
super viewCreated.

self view
	when: CpNavigationAnnouncement
		do: [ :action | self model goto: action location ];
		
	when: CpAddWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self addWord: action data 

];
when: CpDeleteWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self deleteWord:
action data ]. <— this is the one I’m talking about

So I’m curious on the overall thought process here, but in particular
whether I should even submit a PR on Announcer for
#hasSubscriptionsHandling: ?

Tim

I appreciate the further thoughts of others - I should go back and look
at  Dolphin code (I think there are ways to run it on Mac now?).

The upcasting Richard refers to is what I'm trying to do  - which is how I
got interested in understanding if you could tell if someone was subscribed
to an event, as if not - then you could pass it up to the parent to -
re-announce it via the announcer of that parent (in CP - the announcers are
by presenter, so hence the handoff).

In theory it's quite neat - but I did see some deprecations in Announcer
trying to stop too much knowledge leaking out. However, knowing if an event
has any listeners doesn't on the surface seem too controversial - but I can
see that everyone approaches this idea with understandable caution.
Possibly this is masking some other approach to this - or - I can happily
have an extension method on Announcer - or - I can propose this method in a
PR for symetry with some of the other #hasXXXX methods.

Tim

On Tue, 27 Apr 2021, at 5:31 PM, Richard Sargent wrote:

I have seen something called upcasting and downcasting (as contrasted with
broadcasting). Mostly, I have seen it in UI layers.

e.g. a leaf node receives a change notification, decides it isn't
interested in handling the notification, and so passes it up to its parent,
etc.

Downcasting is similar but in the opposite direction. e.g. a window
receives an event and asks its children to handle it, and they do the same.
In this case especially, the one that handles the event needs to mark it as
handled so that no one else is asked to handle it.

On April 27, 2021 5:49:56 AM HST, Tim Mackinnon tim@testit.works wrote:

Hi guys - yes that fire and forget was always how I had viewed announcements, and potentially my scenario is misusing "announcements" which is why I was interested in views here.

However - as announcements are typically a mechanism for farming out processing to others - how does one handle the scenario that you might only want one object to handle the announcement (and not others)?

in my specific example, with MVP - a view, totally decoupled in a web browser, wants to pass on a button click to a presenter - however it not clear what the best mechanism to bubble up that handling should be? If the immediate presenter of the view can handle it - great - but if not, how would you continue to broadcast wider to see if someone higher up the parent component chain can handle it?

If you go fire and forget (which is how I had viewed announcements prior to this specific case) - then you have the problem a different way - when someone processes an announcement it might already have been handled earlier and so the consumer either has to check first, or their work is simply ignored as the announcement payload could just filter a response out.

In my head, I'm sort of thinking this is akin to CPU interrupt chaining - where an interrupt can cascade up a stack if not handled OR like object inheritance where an object can choose to override a message and stop it from cascading up the inheritance chain.

Maybe announcements aren't intended for this at all - although it seems an elegant way to handle it - with just 1 method addition to Announcer (but it does slightly expose things - albeit in a structured way - and similar to the similar #hasSubscriber:).

I'm sure it "depends" - but interested in other observations from the field, as I'm sure I'm not the first person to hit something like this.

Tim

On Tue, 27 Apr 2021, at 3:51 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:

The whole idea is to decouple producers and consumers, like in
messaging systems.

You should not care if there are other listening, just like the
listeners should not care if there is someone posting data.

Asking for subscribers is introducing a coupling.

The announcement mechanism will/should deal with this in an efficient way.

On 27 Apr 2021, at 16:03, Tim Mackinnon tim@testit.works wrote:

From my rather long ramble below - I am still curious if its distasteful to have a method on Announcer

hasSubscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement
"Answer true if I have any subscribers to anAnnouncement"

^(registry subscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement ) notEmpty

Tim

On Thu, 22 Apr 2021, at 11:34 PM, Tim Mackinnon wrote:

Hi everyone - I’ve always thought the article on announcements many
years ago was very cool - and we don’t seem to use them as much as we
could (but equally they aren’t a panacea to be overused everywhere
either - and they do get used in Pharo to some extent).

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with CodeParadise (CP is a very cool
project, and Erik is very supportive and thinking about how to write
web apps a different way… I’m fascinated),

And - CP uses announcements as mechanism to send events from the View
Client (in a web browser) to a Presenter on the server (which makes
total sense).

In taking things for a spin, I hit an interesting problem on how in a
web component world, you should display a spelling test of words -

e.g. SpellingTest — has many —> SpellingWord(s).

Initially I bunged it all in a single presenter with its associated
view, and it was a bit messy, and Erik guided me down a route (that CP
nicely supports) - that my SpellingTest view should have the name/date
of the test as well as an add word input field, but the list of current
Words (which I had bunged into a table) - were actually more elegant as
sub-components - hence a WordView - which renders a single word in a
DIV, and for the edit screen I was creating, a Delete button next to
the word (so you could delete it). So a 1 to many relationship
essentials.

This is where the announcements kick in (and lead to my ultimate question).

When you click the Delete button, if I use a sub component - my view
will generate a DeleteWordAnnouncement - which gets fed to my
SpellingWordPresenter - however words in this sense don’t naturally
know their parent (the SpellingTest) - and its the parent test that has
a #deleteWord: method.

I’ve been taking with Erik, on different ways to elegantly handle this.

a) you could change the model so words know their parent (in my case,
I’m using a 3rd party model for Flashcards, and they just don’t know
this - and adapting them would be a nuisance
b) my TestPresenter could listen to announcements on the WordPresenter

• and I could get some communications between presenters (although
  normally the Presenters just get events from Views, and pure domain
  models - so it feels a bit abnormal to consider another Presenter as a
  sort of model - but I could live with this
  c) given the composable nature of views/presenters (and CP is base on a
  WebComponent model) - you could bubble up Announcements, so that if an
  event isn’t handled by a view’s immediate presenter, you could re-route
  it to the parent of the View (the component owner) and see if it’s
  presenter could do something.

I think (c) has a certain expectation to it - in fact when I converted
my initial one-presenter attempt into components, I still had listener
code in my TestPresenter that was expecting to get a deleteWord
announcement and I was initially surprised that I wasn’t getting it (as
it was now just going to the Word component I had refactored out).

So I wonder if others here would expect things to work this way too
(and are there other examples in the wild that lead you here - or scare
you away from this?).

Back to  my Announcement question - if C is a good idea - why doesn’t
the Announcer class let you check if if will handle a particular
announcement? The API has  #hasSubscriber: and #hasSubscriberClass: ,
but its missing:

hasSubscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement
"Answer true if I have any subcribers to anAnnouncement"

^(registry subscriptionsHandling: anAnnouncement ) notEmpty

And I am wondering if this is because it's a bad thing to expect to be
able to check? In my case above, I would want to do this to know if CP
should instead try announcing a message to a parent presenter because
the current presenter won’t handle it.  In my example above, my
WordComponentView will broadcast that the delete button was clicked,
but its actually a parent view which would reasonably want to listen to
this kind of event and process the delete.  And in a many words
scenario (the Test has many words), its unrealistic for the parent to
register to listen to each word component individually (in fact CP sort
of hides this from you), however if you could listen to an event in
your TestView, it seems to come out quite nicely  - and looks a bit
like this:

viewCreated
super viewCreated.

self view
	when: CpNavigationAnnouncement
		do: [ :action | self model goto: action location ];
		
	when: CpAddWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self addWord: action data

];
when: CpDeleteWordAnnouncement do: [ :action | self deleteWord:
action data ]. <— this is the one I’m talking about

So I’m curious on the overall thought process here, but in particular
whether I should even submit a PR on Announcer for
#hasSubscriptionsHandling: ?

Tim