IORs

The notion of a remote object in CORBA is represented by an Interoperable Object Reference (IOR). An IOR contains type information and a sequence of tagged profiles. SST currently supports only IIOP so all IORs must have an IIOP profile which contains the TCP/IP address of the object's server location. While standard IDL-to-Smalltalk mapping represents IORs as dictionaries, SST provides IOR objects which respond to Dictionary protocol as well as several helper methods. SstIor objects can be created from object references in string form, using the following protocol:

fromString: value

Converts an IOR in string form into an SstIor according to the CORBA conversion specifications for ORB::string_to_object. @value indicates the IOR in the form of the output of CORBA::object_to_string() in the repository's native environment, the name of a file containing such a string, or an HTTP URL indicating the location of a page containing the IOR string.

When acting as an object server, it is often necessary to create SstIor objects to represent some other object residing locally. SstIor's can be created explicitly by you, or automatically created by the marshaler if a normal object is encountered when marshaling a request using sstAsIorInContext. The protocols for explicit creation of an SstIor are as follows:

for: anObject context: context

Answers a Smalltalk form of an ::IOP::IOR, representing @anObject with no type information.

for: anObject context: context key: exportKey

Answers a Smalltalk form of an ::IOP::IOR, representing @anObject. Type information is not given. The key used in exporting @anObject is @exportKey.

for: anObject type: typeId context: context

Answers a Smalltalk form of an ::IOP::IOR, representing @anObject with whatever type information is provided by @typeId. To determine an appropriate object key for @anObject, @context is used to find a local space. If the context is not capable of exporting an object, an exception is thrown.

for: anObject type: typeId context: context key: exportKey

Answers a Smalltalk form of an ::IOP::IOR, representing @anObject with whatever type information is provided by @typeId. The key used in exporting @anObject is @exportKey. If the context is not capable of exporting an object, an exception is thrown.

nullIor

Answers a Smalltalk form of an ::IOP::IOR, representing a null object reference.

When interacting with an ORB from a particular vendor running on a particular machine, you might want to forge an IOR directly rather than use a naming service or a common file system. Note that this is not a safe or approved mechanism for general CORBA interactions and relies on vendor-specific details of how they construct their object keys in IORs. If you really require this facility, the following API in the SstIor class might help:

at: location key: key typeId: typeId

Answers an instance of the receiver with the type ID information set to @typeId. The profile information for the answer is constructed from the @location information identifying the machine location and the @key information specifying the object's unique ID at that location.