More thoughts on Remoting

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working with AMF for the first time this week. I'd read about using AsyncTokens to be able to determine which call to a service resulted in which result, so from the very beginning I'd intended to use this. The problem I had was that when I looked at the docs for RemoteObject, I couldn't find anything that actually returns an AsyncToken. So at first I figured I couldn't do it.

But here's the thing. All of my commands to access the RemoteObject use static properties and methods, which essentially means that for each service there's only one RemoteObject that gets used from any object in the application that needs to call that service. These different parts of the application didn't know about each other, and I didn't want them to. Nor did I want to make these commands refuse any new calls before the old one was finished. So I had to make this AsyncToken thing work, or completely change the architecture of how I was calling AMF.

Finally, I found the documentation for mx.rpc.remoting.Operation (don't ask me how). It turns out that a remoting Operation is the method on the service that you're calling. When you call a RemoteObject operation, you're invoking the Operation Class's send method, so it seems that creating an AsyncToken from a RemoteObject call is as simple as myToken:AsyncToken=myRemoteObject.myService(whateverParameters). I'm not sure exactly how you're supposed to figure that out unless you happen to luck into the right information like I did, since there's no direct link between the language reference on RemoteObjects and that on Operation, and it's only referred to in passing in a parentetical expression in the RemoteObject "how to" type documentation.

One of my command classes needed to be able to accept a result and fault function from the instance that was calling the service, so I then needed to find a way to set a Responder on the token. The first thing I tried was simply to push a new Responder onto the token's responders Array. Let me save you a little time and tell you in advance this doesn't work. Instead, you need to use the AsyncToken's addResponder() method.