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This may be a broad question but I have not been able to find an answer.

In my program I am communicating to a device over serial communication. The data coming through is binary, and formatted with some header/length/checksum bytes. I can decode the data fine, the part I am stuck on is what is a good practice on distributing that data to parts of the program.

In this example lets say there are 10 different message types, that the serial port can receive. Module A in the program wants Messages 1 to 5, and Module B wants messages 6 to 10.

When the serial port finds a valid message, how should it notify Module A and Module B?

Right now I am implementing it by registering callbacks for any module that wants serial data, and send the message to all modules registered, whether its for them or not. I am curious if there is a more accepted design/architecture for this type of problem.

I will have to do the same thing with CAN and ethernet devices, so wanted to try and get this implemented correctly. I am currently working in C.

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  • Pub+Sub pattern. If you can break out enough of the header to grab some useful identifier then use your callback mechanism and allow each callback to specify what identifier(s) it is interested in. Then you will have one choke point at the higher layer that only sends messages to callbacks looking at that identifier and the lower layers won't have to do lots of additional processing. Side note: assuming that this is all happening on the same machine try to not copy the serial data into the message but simply move the data reference via the message.
    – Patrick Hughes
    Feb 11, 2019 at 19:50

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Right now I am implementing it by registering callbacks for any module that wants serial data, and send the message to all modules registered, whether its for them or not. I am curious if there is a more accepted design/architecture for this type of problem.

What you are describing is beginnings of a publish-subscribe design pattern. The parsers which create messages from CAN and Ethernet are the publishers. The modules A and B are subscribers.

In many publish-subscribe implementations, the publishers and subscribers register with the message broker, and not with each-other. So, the publishers and subscribers are decoupled.

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When the serial port finds a valid message, how should it notify Module A and Module B?

First, you should consider whether the message format can be adapted in such a way that makes dispatching easy. E.g. if each type of message can be given a unique ID, you can dispatch based on it without parsing the entire message. Then modules can register a callback for specific message IDs. This way you decouple both the parsing and dispatching.

If that's not viable, you may consider sending a message to each module in turn and let the module indicate whether the message was handled, e.g. by returning a boolean. This may save some CPU cycles.

However, if tightly coupling the parsing/dispatching is not a big problem, then consider the simple design of parsing and dispatching in a single place. This has the benefit that it makes the structure of (this part of) the program very clear.

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