Netidx Dbus

Netidx dbus is a bridge from dbus to netidx. The netidx-dbus daemon will use dbus introspection to discover the tree of connections, objects, interfaces, properties, and signals in dbus, and then it will publish that information to netidx. Properties are modeled as simple netidx values, you can subscribe to them like any other value, and if the property value changes (and the owner of the connection follows the specification and notifies about the change) then the netidx value will update. Writing to a property causes netidx to call the appropriate dbus method to set the propery value. Methods are modeled as netidx rpcs, calling the netidx rpc causes the dbus method to be called, types are translated in both directions automaticaly. Signals are modeled as non writable properties with an initial value of null; when a signal happens subscribed clients will receive it's value, but subscriptions that happen after the signal will not.

netidx-dbus organizes the dbus namespace into a tree organized by type. At the top level there are two subtrees activatible and connections. Activatible lists connections to dbus that can be automatically started by dbus, but may not be running now. To activate an activatible service just write anything to it's value in the activatible subtree. Connections lists services that are currently connected to dbus. Connected services contain two subtrees, children and interfaces. Children contains immediate children of the object, in this case of the root object of the connection. Interfaces contains a list of interfaces implemented by the object. Under each interface are up to three subtrees, methods, properties, and signals, which will be present if the interface implements any of the corresponding item. This is unfortunately verbose, but it is necessary to prevent namespace clashes, and it mirrors the unfortunately verbose way that dbus thinks about the world.