I have created a dll that contains a couple of methods, one is to check a zip file to see if the entries match criteria. Another method extracts the entries.... and so on.
There other methods that check to see if a file is a valid file, etc... as well.
My question is ... how do I synchronize these methods? I don't want to prevent other methods from accessing the same file...
Thanks!
The term "synchronize" brings to mind the issues that arise with multiple threads, but I don't think that is what you are referring to.
Are you just trying to lock out other programs from accessing the file in question while you are dealing with it?
Basic idea of locking files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking
The dwShareMode parameter in CreateFile is probably what you want to check out: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363858.aspx
Hmm.... not sure of the term to use I guess.
What I am trying to do is to access methods in a dll from Java (using JNI).
I can call native methods, ie: isZipFile(.... ) extractZip(.... ).
I am sending 1 - n files to be checked, or extracted -- and it is crashing out.
I'm calling the native method for each file... ie:
isZipFile(String fileName);
Would this crash out if the method is processing/executing the last file, and it's called before the method has completed?
It should only crash if you don't implement proper error checking. If you check the return value of your zip file access functions (such as extractZip) then your program should be able to properly handle any access violation issues.
If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.
The c code contains a load dll method. Loads the unzip32.dll
The method I wrote was to call the dll function to extract the zip entries from the specified zip file name.
Takes the file name, and a few defined structures.
The return from the dll call is an integer code representing the success/error code.Code:int extractZipFile(char* zipFilename) { if (!zipFileName) { return 0; } if (strlen(zipFileName) <= 0) { return 0; } return (whichever call to dll function ....); }
It works every time when testing and calling the method one file at a time from within the C code... I call the function, it returns, I call the function, it returns....
However, when run on more than one file at a time, calling from JNI -- "it crashes"...
I thought it might have something to do with sending 1 - n calls to the dll function.
From Java calling the native method, the function could get called again before it returns from the last call. Would that matter?
It could if it's not a reentrant function. Functions which have some kind of internal mechanism for keeping track of things in a non-automatic type of way (global or static variable are common) then the second call could corrupt whatever data is in the variable while the first call is using it.
A lot of functions have a reentrant-safe version. For instance, the strtok() function needs to keep track of where it is in the string between calls in order to parse it correctly. If you called strtok() from another thread while the first thread was trying to use it, it would corrupt the internal static buffer. To get around the problem, a lot of environments have a strtok_r() function which accepts a 3rd parameter.
I don't know if your dll has a similar workaround, but it might be worth looking into.char *strtok_r(char *s, const char *delim, char **ptrptr);
The strtok_r() function works the same as the strtok()
function, but instead of using a static buffer it uses a
pointer to a user allocated char* pointer. This pointer,
the ptrptr parameter, must be the same while parsing the
same string.
If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything.
