Faactory.Channels.Buffers 0.6.1

Channels Buffers

A simple library to handle buffer reading and writing.

Design

An important fact on buffers, is that they were designed to work exclusively for reading or writing, not both. So, a buffer that IsReadable == true will be IsWritable == false and the other way around. This was a design decision and applies to both WrappedByteBuffer and WritableByteBuffer.

It is possible to interchange this behaviour by creating a writable buffer from a readable and vice-versa, by using the MakeReadOnly and MakeWritable extension methods.

Getting Started

When using Channels, you won't usually need to manually create a buffer instance, since you can interchange Byte[] and IByteBuffer types in the adapters. Nonetheless, if required, you can use WritableByteBuffer to create a writable buffer and a WrappedByteBuffer to create a readable buffer.

When reading data from a buffer, we have two distinct ways of doing so: by getting a value or by reading a value.

Getting a value from the buffer does not change the current buffer offset, but reading a value, moves the offset forward.

IByteBuffer buffer = ...;

// reads a byte at 'customOffset' without changing the buffer's offset
var b1 = buffer.GetByte( customOffset );

// reads a byte at the buffer's current offset and moves the offset 1 byte forward
var b2 = buffer.ReadByte();

Good to know...

• The remaining readable bytes in the buffer are exposed by the ReadableBytes property.
• Invoking DiscardReadBytes discards all read bytes (ReadXXX methods) and resets the offset
• Invoking ResetOffset undoes previous readings and resets the offset
• Invoking ToArray returns the entire buffer no matter where the buffer offset is
• Except for the getting and reading methods, the buffer interface uses a fluent design