Hi Christophe and all
Now I have to put some effort to residing out code using MSM because one of our module where we use MSM has reached it's limits and we won't be able to compile it any more with VC9 32 bit compiler. In our implementation we have several sub state machines (around 20 per main state machine instance at the moment) ( nested in 4 level deep) and over time as we extend the functionality we introduce new sub state machines which are covering new functionality ...
We now can not add any more new sub state machines because we can not compile any more :(.
While big improvements were made, there will always be a limit, especially with VC9. Did you try with VC10? It'd be interesting to know.
So I have decided to split the big state machines with a lot of subs state machines to stand alone small state machine instances and use our dispatching framework to dispatch events between them. This way I will get small compile units.
Sounds good.
I'm managed to complete a job apart form one problem I have now. I'm not able to generally trigger the exit functions on the current active states of a state machine when it is finished it's execution like when a sub state machine exists to the outer state machine.
If you mean in the fsm destructor, it's true. I'd be surprised though if on_exit was not called when leaving a submachine to its outer.
Is it possible to implement something like stop method on the back end which would call exit on each region current state and than an exit of the state machine whit an event passed as an argument. ?
this would help me a lot and it would be similar to the start.
Ah yes I remember thinking about it in the early phase of MSM. Unfortunately I don't remember why it was not done, just that I had a reason at that time. Actually I think it'd be even better to automatically call on_exit in the destructor. The start method is there only because you might not want to start a state machine immediately upon creation, but I have never had a very good feeling about it, so I'd prefer not repeating this. Is there a reason why you want a stop method or the calls of on_exit inside the destructor would suffice (provided I don't hit again the issue I mentioned above)?
other minor thing is it possible to make public this version of start methode in the back_end ?
template <class Event> void start(Event const& incomingEvent)
I'm not sure you'd be happy with this because on_entry is not called in this version (it's meant to be called from the outer machine, which itself calls on_entry), so you'd have to call it yourself. What are you trying to achieve? Regards, Christophe
Br. Richard