Inside Macintosh: Networking With Open Transport / Part 1 - Open Transport Essentials

Chapter 3 - Providers

This chapter describes providers, software entities that offer data-oriented services, and introduces the main types of providers. It also discusses the use of general provider functions, which you can use with any provider regardless of its type. You use these functions to

• open and close providers

• set a provider's mode of operation

• cancel synchronous processing

• issue a command directly to a STREAMS module underlying a provider

Later chapters in this book describe each type of provider in detail. This chapter describes the function you use to close a provider because you use the same function for all types of providers.

Before you read this chapter, you should read the chapter "Introduction to Open Transport". After reading this chapter, you can read the chapter describing the provider whose services you are interested in. To use the functions described in this chapter, you must first use the InitOpenTransport function to initialize Open Transport. This function is described in the chapter "Getting Started With Open Transport".

For reference information about the functions and data structures introduced in this chapter, see "Providers Reference".

---

Chapter Contents

About Providers

Provider Functions

Interrupt-Time Processing

Modes of Operation

Provider Events

Function Results

Using Providers

Controlling a Provider's Modes of Operation

Which Mode To Use

Specifying How Provider Functions Execute

Setting a Provider's Blocking Status

Setting a Provider's Send-Acknowledgment Status

Using Notifier Functions to Handle Provider Events

Transferring a Provider's Ownership

Closing a Provider