Re: reading from a FIFO into a cell

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 06:30:56PM -0500, Edgar Hilton wrote:
> Does anybody know whether:
>
> 1. gnumeric allows you to read streaming data from a FIFO
> 2. failing #1 above, would anybody know where I should look to add this
> into the GNUMERIC source?

I am not clear on what you are trying to do.  Are you trying to read

a) 1 value at a time or many values
b) What are the recalculation semantics

If the goal is 1 value that will cause a complete recalc whenever
the value changes then we do not support it now, but adding it would
be fairly easy.  You could create a plugin (see numbertheory for an
example) that adds 'read_fifo(fifo_name)'.  Then use g_io_add_watch 
to register to wath the fifo for content.  This will not be as easy
as I'd like until 2.0 because there is no easy way to manage extra
data for each instance of a function call yet.  However, with a bit
of creativity you should be able to do it by keeping a register of
what has been called, and double checking that it is still there
when data arrives.  For 2.0 I plan to extend things so that it will
be easier to manage this sort of thing.

Hope that helps
    Jody