Re: Another userdata question

This will depend on whether your userdata is light userdata or full userdata. Both you will get as pointers, but one (full) is pointing to memory owned and managed by Lua (which will be garbage collected) and the other (light) is just a pointer value which points somewhere (not owned by Lua).

So if you have a light userdata, then if you've stashed it away somewhere in C, you can just push it onto the stack as light userdata, not much different than pushing a number value.

If you have full userdata, you have to get it from somewhere in Lua, because Lua doesn't provide a way for you to store it outside of Lua in C. Further, there needs to be a reference to it somewhere in Lua, so that it isn't garbage collected.

It is possible however to maintain a mapping (relational table in Lua) between light userdata and full userdata. (Make sure the full userdata are weak values so they do not prevent garbage collection.) Then, given a light userdata (the C pointer) you can lookup the full userdata (the Lua object related to it).

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Geoff Smith <spammealot1@live.co.uk> wrote:

Hello

Thanks for the replies, the tricky bit I am stuck on is illustrated with these 2 lines from the quoted example

    // and the registry to store the Lua object (this time a Lua table).
    lua_State * L = GetWindowLongPtr(hwnd, GWLP_USERDATA);
    lua_rawgetp(L, LUA_REGISTRYINDEX, (void*)hwnd);

In my example when the instance of the userdata was created I kept a copy of the pointer to the userdata instance on the C side.  So instead of the above example where it gets the object ptr from the registry and pushes it onto the stack I was thinking I just push my stashed ptr with something like a pushUserdata() API function.

Only snag with my idea is no such function exists :( So how do I get my instance ptr back on the stack so that I can see if it has got an associated action function defined in the Lua code ?

Maybe I should stash it in and retrieve it from the Registry anyway ?

Thanks for any further tips. For info, I am using Lua 5.1

Regards Geoff

Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:32:10 +0800
From: pengzhicheng1986@gmail.com
To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
Subject: Re: Another userdata question

于 2013-11-13 4:48, Geoff Smith 写道:

I am really hoping someone could help me with this question please as I am totally stuck on it for now.

I am trying to implement a userdata via the C API, to give me this type of functionality

btn1 = graphics.newButton(x,y,width,ht, "pressMe")
btn1:setText("Different Text")
btn1:setFont("Arial")

That's OK I think I have got that figured out and largely working, but the next thing I want to do is call a user defined Lua action function on the button instance. For example

In Lua

function btn1:action(someArbitrayParamBackFromC)
     print("ouch someone just poked btn1")
end

How can I call that Lua button instance function from C when I have detected the key is pressed ?

I have done something vaguely similar in the past when I have created a custom timer on the Lua side, but the difference was I had a timer create function in Lua such as

myNewTimer = createTimer( period, luaFunctionCallback)

So I was passed the callback function into the C code which meant I could stash it away in the registry and then when the timer elapsed on the C side, I did this

// push function indexed by registryRef from the registry back onto the stack
// the lua callback function in this case
lua_rawgeti(local_L, LUA_REGISTRYINDEX, registryRef);
/* the first function argument is the timerID */
lua_pushinteger(local_L, myTimerID);
/* call the function with 1 argument, return 0 result */
pcallResult = lua_pcall(local_L,1,0,0);    // pops 2 params from stack

I am guessing the solution is somewhat similar but cant figure it out.

Many thanks for any assistance

   Geoff

You are right. The solution is similar.

In your Timer example, you retrieved the callback Lua function which was passed to the C side
when the timer was created. While in your button press example, you should retrieve the button
object first, then call the specified method on that object.

Thus said, I assumed you had used some method (e.g. GetWindowLongPtr) to associate the
button object (from Lua) with the *native* button object of the underlying GUI system.

Following is an imaginary example to illustrate this idea to bind Lua to Win32 message system.
Just as an illustration, can't claim the correctness.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[inside the window procedure of the button]
[...]

case WM_LBUTTONUP:
    // first retrive the associated object of the Lua side.
    // the following is just an demo method using GWLP_USERDATA to store L
// and the registry to store the Lua object (this time a Lua table).
    lua_State * L = GetWindowLongPtr(hwnd, GWLP_USERDATA);
    lua_rawgetp(L, LUA_REGISTRYINDEX, (void*)hwnd);

    // then call the "action" method on the button object
    lua_getfield(L, -1, "action");

    // do some check
    if (!lua_isnil(L, -1)) {
        // push the self parameter
        lua_pushvalue(L, -2);
        lua_pcall(L, 1, 1, 0);
        // check the callback return value and do some processing
        [...]
    }
case WM_XXXX:
[...]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------