Communicator

An Ice communicator has numerous responsibilities:

• it holds configuration properties
• it creates and manages client connections
• when the application makes an invocation, it selects the connection to use (and sometimes create this connection)
• it provides invocation timeouts, invocation retries, logging/tracing, and metrics
• it's used to create object adapters and more.

IceRPC replaces this multi-purpose Communicator with smaller, more focused objects and abstractions that you compose to get the behavior you want.

IceRPC has no equivalent for Ice configuration properties, and does not rely on any particular configuration file format. In C#, IceRPC follows the Options Pattern, which allows you to set configuration programmatically or in a JSON file.

The bulk of Communicator's client-side functionality corresponds to an IceRPC invocation pipeline that flows into a ConnectionCache.

A Communicator-like invocation pipeline would include the following interceptors:

• the Deadline interceptor (for invocation timeouts)
• the Locator interceptor (to resolve "indirect proxies" using an Ice Locator)
• the Logger interceptor
• the Metrics interceptor (to collect metrics)
• the RequestContext interceptor (to send request contexts)
• the Retry interceptor (for automatic invocation retries)

When you create a client application with IceRPC, you should create an invocation pipeline with the interceptors you need—don't include all built-in interceptors "just in case". You should also check if a ClientConnection is more appropriate than a ConnectionCache for your application.

Example

using var communicator = Ice.Util.initialize(ref args);

var hello = HelloPrxHelper.checkedCast(
    communicator.stringToProxy(
        "hello:default -h localhost -p 10000"));

hello.sayHello();

communicator.shutdown();

await using var connection = new ClientConnection(
    new Uri("ice://localhost:10000"));

// We install only the deadline and retry interceptors.
Pipeline pipeline = new Pipeline()
    .UseDeadline(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30))
    .UseRetry()
    .Into(connection);

var helloProxy = new HelloProxy(
    pipeline,
    new Uri("ice:/hello"));

await helloProxy.SayHelloAsync();

await connection.ShutdownAsync();