Access Scope Bug in Actor Framework?!?

[psyklopz]

Our company is working at building a library that contains a few overrides to different parts of the AF.  One of the things we accomplished was to create our own actor class that inherits from the AF actor.  This actor then has it's own override for the Handle Error.vi.  We added code for it to send a message to the caller with a description and call chain of the error.  In order to do this, we needed to change the access scope on the "Get Queue for Sending to Caller.vi" from protected to public, because it is being accessed from a different library.

Because it is encouraged to change the "Handle Error.vi" to work for your particular situation, this isn't a hack job.  (There are event comments explaining what to override within the "Actor Core.vi" to create this functionality.)  But the only way I know how to do this is to modify the AF.  How would you otherwise do this without having to modify the access scope on the AF?  If there is no other way, I'm led to believe this is a bug in the AF, as these methods need to be and should be public.

As a side note, we also had to change the scope on the "Get Queue for Sending to Self.vi" as well, for another function we're adding to the AF.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Those two functions definitely shouldn't be public, so let's see what we can do to get you a better solution.

If you're making those functions pubic, it means that someone has a full copy of the actor after the actor has been launched (because before the actor is launched, those fields are both Not A Refnum and so are useless). That's something that should not happen until after the actor has shut down again and the caller gets the full actor back in the Last Ack message. Something is clearly wrong if you have any part of your outside-of-actor code capable of calling those methods, regardless of whether they are public or protected.

If all you need to do is send the error to your caller, your override of Handle Error should look something like this:

Where does your need to make the caller and self queues public come into this?

[psyklopz]

Ok, with your advise and some collaboration with a couple coworkers, in a message's do.vi we were using the "Get Queue for Sending to Self.vi", because the message does not inherit from the actor, this was causing the access violation.  The message now calls a subVI of our overridden actor, and this subVI does have access to the queue vis and problem solved.

Thanks!  I love the Actor Framework and all your help in making it all it is.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Excellent!

The vast majority of messages do nothing in their Do.vi except call a actor's method. The method then does all the heavy lifting.