This post was originally published at Walking the Wires

At Delacor we often talk about programming style, and I like to refer to Fab’s style as “defensive programming”. The overwhelming theme in her code is focussed on robustness and avoiding, wherever possible, the opportunity for things to go wrong. Over the past few years this has resulted in several internal “tips & tricks” for avoiding potential issues.

Allow me to introduce The Safe Programmer’s Corner. Here you will find articles aimed at making you a safer, more robust programmer.

We hope you like our idea.

Bike

I remember as a child sticking playing cards to the spokes of my bicycle wheels because they made this cool sound. It turns out that one of my friends didn’t feel it was so cool and decided that one day he should knock them off with a stick…………..whilst I was riding the bike………….at speed.

The feeling of going over the handlebars and the pain of hitting my head on the ground comes back to me occasionally. Usually prompted by seeing something like this:

 

We have three While loops executing in parallel. The termination mechanism for two of the loops is provided by monitoring the status of a queue. The queue may or may not be used as a data transport mechanism elsewhere, but for two of the loops it is purely providing a stopping mechanism.

The code uses the error out terminal of the Get Queue Status primitive to stop execution on error. If the queue has been destroyed elsewhere, then the Get Queue Status primitive will return an error and stop the loop. Destroying the queue in a single location becomes the way of stopping multiple loops (which may or may not be executing on the same block diagram).

This is great, right? No need for Local or Global Variables, and no need to code up some other elaborate stopping mechanism.  Maybe so, but many times I see the above construct result in unwanted behaviour. It is a blunt instrument, because we have a globally accessible stop that halts the entire application with no way to trace who did the halting (this isn’t going to be fun debugging at 2am!).  The queue is not private and could be shared through the hierarchy, so anyone can choose to destroy it.

The person writing the application is choosing to destroy a queue and not specifically taking action to stop the application.  It is simply a side effect that destroying the queue stops the application. If we need code in loop 3 that executes on close, we need to check for the error and ensure that the error code is 1 (queue destroyed).

This all feels a little like jamming a stick in the wheels.

The biggest mistake I see developers make is failing to call the Destroy Queue primitive, either literally through coding omission or procedurally through program execution, causing the call to never actually happen. In addition, a single developer might know that his intention was to stop the application this way. What happens if this code is later supported by a team or by a different developer? How are they supposed to know this was the original intention?

Instead I prefer that a developer creates and sends a dedicated Stop message. Something like this (although I don’t claim that this is in anyway a complete architecture) where the Stop message is a dedicated message that has been coded specifically to stop the application.

 

I know that this block diagram is somewhat more complex than the earlier example, but it is more scalable and robust than our original code.

We may choose to execute repetitive code in the timeout case of the event handlers (once I’ve added a timeout!)

To make the code more robust, we can wrap the event creation in a modified FGV (Functional Global Variable) as shown below, lets call it Obtain Stop.vi.  Now it is possible to have all of those loops executing in separate VIs (yes there’s a caveat as to who should destroy the event, see here for more details on that).

 

We can now wrap our event generation code in a subVI, lets call it Send Stop.vi. It will call our Obtain Stop.vi and it probably looks something like this:

 

We now have a way to search for every location where we might be stopping our application by searching for the above VI.

Finally we need to destroy our stop event when our loops stop running. Similarly to the Send Stop.vi we can call Obtain Stop.vi and then destroy the returned reference.

 

Now we have a block diagram that looks something like that shown below (click on the image to expand):

 

For an even more robust and scalable solution, take a look a the DQMH project template, where the application main VI stops all of the modules in the exit case.

I must also say that there are other extremely robust frameworks out there that use the destroy queue behaviour to stop the execution of loops however mostly their queues are being used as a message transport mechanism and the stop behaviour is simply a bi-product of that. Additionally these are message based architectures where the sending of a message can be traced within the hierarchy.

For example, in Actor Framework the code that sends the stop is in its own VI and the code that receives the stop is the same code that is already receiving other messages.

I hope this short post provokes some thoughts. Do you use the destroy queue method for stopping loops? How does it work for you? Have you come across this design pattern in the wild?

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback on this or any of the material we talk about.

Wire safely folks!

Chris