One GPS, multiple windows

After publishing the simple GPS class on my last post, I found myself in a situation where I needed the same CGps object to notify more than one window whenever a new GPS event arrived. My scenario is quite simple: while feeding a window with a map, I also need the same CGps object to notify another window where I display some GPS information like the current latitude and longitude coordinates.

The original code supports notifications for one window only so, to solve this issue I could create another instance of the CGps class and have it notify the new window. Although this would work, it would also create an extra thread in the appliction (if you look at the CGps implementation, you will see that it uses a thread to wait on the GPSID events) which is unneeded and consumes more system resources.

I ended up by devising a simpler solution: add multiple window handle - message pairs to the notification mechanism. To implement this I created a new class - CWindowNotifier - that is nothing more than a simple array of HWND and UINT pairs. When the consuming object wants to send a notification to a set of windows, it just calls the appropriate method (Post or Send). If one of the notification windows was closed, the code automatically removes it from the notification list. Using this class is very simple: just call the AddWindow method with the HWND you want to notify and a UINT value containing the message code for the notification. When you want to send a notification use either the Post or Send methods. The Post method uses the PostMessage API so it returns immediately and is the one I recommend for most uses. The Send method uses the SendMessage API, so it works synchronously and waits before all notification windows have responded. You can get the class source code here.

The updated CGps source code is here. Note that this new version uses a new wrapper for the CRITICAL_SECTION objects which you can find here. Enjoy.