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Overview of Universal Messaging Facility

The Universal Messaging Facility provides a number of tools that a handler author can use to construct arbitrarily complex messages and send them to other handlers published on the same server. The sending of a message triggers one or more initiators. The initiators have inputs that allow the author to specify which handlers will trigger based on data contained in each message.

The originating handler can create a message and add elements of various types. Then it can choose to send the message as an event (asynchronously) to which it expects no reply or as a request (synchronously). When a message is sent as a request the toolstep in the originating handler waits for a message to be returned before continuing.

The receiving handler uses the tools that get data elements from the message. The receiving handler can in turn use the message construction tools to create and send a message to yet another handler or to send a response back to the original handler if appropriate.

NOTE: This subsystem depends on some basic CIC components as well as on Microsoft’s MFC libraries. These items must be present in executable form at runtime, as well as represented by .lib and .h files at compile time.

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