This is the third in a series of blog posts on creating an asynchronous D-Bus service in python. For the inital entry, go here. For the previous entry, go here

Last time we transformed our base synchronous D-Bus service to include asynchronous calls in a rather naive way. In this post, we’ll refactor those asynchronous calls to include D-Bus signals; codewise, we’ll pick up right where we left off after part 2: https://github.com/larryprice/python-dbus-blog-series/tree/part2. Of course, all of today’s code can be found in the same project with the part3 tag: https://github.com/larryprice/python-dbus-blog-series/tree/part3.

Sending Signals

We can fire signals from within our D-Bus service to notify clients of tasks finishing, progress updates, or data availability. Clients subscribe to these signals and act accordingly. Let’s start by changing the signature of the slow_result method of RandomData to be a signal:

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# ...
@dbus.service.signal("com.larry_price.test.RandomData", signature='ss')
def slow_result(self, thread_id, result):
    pass

We’ve replaced the context decorator with a signal, and we’ve swapped out the guts of this method for a pass, meaning the method will call but doesn’t do anything else. We now need a way to call this signal, which we can do from the SlowThread class we were using before. When creating a SlowThread in the slow method, we can pass in this signal as a callback. At the same time, we can remove the threads list we used to use to keep track of existing SlowThread objects.

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class RandomData(dbus.service.Object):
    def __init__(self, bus_name):
        super().__init__(bus_name, "/com/larry_price/test/RandomData")

        random.seed()

    @dbus.service.method("com.larry_price.test.RandomData",
                         in_signature='i', out_signature='s')
    def slow(self, bits=8):
        thread = SlowThread(bits, self.slow_result)
        return thread.thread_id

    # ...

Now we can make some updates to SlowThread. The first thing we should do is add a new parameter callback and store it on the object. Because slow_result no longer checks the done property, we can remove that and the finished event. Instead of calling set on the event, we can now simply call the callback we stored with the current thread_id and result. We end up with a couple of unused variables here, so I’ve also gone ahead and refactored the work method on SlowThread to be a little cleaner.

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# ...

class SlowThread(object):
    def __init__(self, bits, callback):
        self._callback = callback
        self.result = ''

        self.thread = threading.Thread(target=self.work, args=(bits,))
        self.thread.start()
        self.thread_id = str(self.thread.ident)

    def work(self, bits):
        num = ''

        while True:
            num += str(random.randint(0, 1))
            bits -= 1
            time.sleep(1)

            if bits <= 0:
                break

        self._callback(self.thread_id, str(int(num, 2)))

And that’s it for the service-side. Any callers will need to subscribe to our slow_result method, call our slow method, and wait for the result to come in.

Receiving Signals

We need to make some major changes to our client program in order to receive signals. We’ll need to introduce a main loop, which we’ll spin up in a separate thread, for communicating on the bus. The way I like to do this is with a ContextManager so we can guarantee that the loop will be exited when the program exits. We’ll move the logic we previously used in client to get the RandomData object into a private member method called _setup_object, which we’ll call on context entry after creating the loop. On context exit, we’ll simply call quit on the loop.

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# Encapsulate calling the RandomData object on the session bus with a main loop
import dbus, dbus.exceptions, dbus.mainloop.glib
import threading
from gi.repository import GLib
class RandomDataClient(object):
    def __enter__(self):
        self._setup_dbus_loop()
        self._setup_object()

        return self

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_value, traceback):
        self._loop.quit()
        return True

    def _setup_dbus_loop(self):
        dbus.mainloop.glib.DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
        self._loop = GLib.MainLoop()

        self._thread = threading.Thread(target=self._loop.run)
        self._thread.start()

    def _setup_object(self):
        try:
            self._bus = dbus.SessionBus()
            self._random_data = self._bus.get_object("com.larry-price.test",
                                                     "/com/larry_price/test/RandomData")
        except dbus.exceptions.DBusException as e:
            print("Failed to initialize D-Bus object: '%s'" % str(e))
            sys.exit(2)

We can add methods on RandomDataClient to encapsulate quick and slow. quick is easy - we’ll just return self._random_data.quick(bits). slow, on the other hand, will take a bit of effort. We’ll need to subscribe to the slow_result signal, giving a callback for when the signal is received. Since we want to wait for the result here, we’ll create a threading.Event object and wait for it to be set, which we’ll do in our handler. The handler, which we’ll call _finished will validate that it has received the right result based on the current thread_id and then set the result on the RandomDataClient object. After all this, we’ll remove the signal listener from our bus connection and return the final result.

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class RandomDataClient(object):
    # ...

    def quick(self, bits):
        return self._random_data.quick(bits)

    def _finished(self, thread_id, result):
        if self._thread_id == self._thread_id:
            self._result = result
            self._done.set()

    def slow(self, bits):
        self._done = threading.Event()
        self._thread_id = None
        self._result = None

        signal = self._bus.add_signal_receiver(path="/com/larry_price/test/RandomData", handler_function=self._finished,
                                               dbus_interface="com.larry_price.test.RandomData", signal_name='slow_result')
        self._thread_id = self._random_data.slow(bits)
        self._done.wait()
        signal.remove()

        return self._result

Now we’re ready to actually call these methods. We’ll wrap our old calling code with the RandomDataClient context manager, and we’ll directly call the methods as we did before on the client:

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# ...

# Call the appropriate method with the given number of bits
with RandomDataClient() as client:
    if args.slow:
        print("Your random number is: %s" % client.slow(int(args.bits)))
    else:
        print("Your random number is: %s" % client.quick(int(args.bits)))

This should have feature-parity with our part 2 code, but now we don’t have to deal with an infinite loop waiting for the service to return.

Next time

We have a working asynchronous D-Bus service using signals. Next time I’d like to dive into forwarding command output from a D-Bus service to a client.

As a reminder, the end result of our code in this post is MIT Licensed and can be found on Github: https://github.com/larryprice/python-dbus-blog-series/tree/part3.