Hi,

I am just starting to play with WO again after having worked on some other stuff and have come across what I believe to be a bug in the D2W class. I tried googling the "WebAssistant: You backtracked too far" error message with no positive results and finally decided to track it down myself.

What I came up with appears to be a weak reference problem with the D2W._Observer instance used to observe the WORequestHandlerDidHandleRequestNotification. For other notifications including that same notification as used to call the willCheckRules method, the D2W singleton itself is registered with NSNotificationCenter.

The relevant (decompiled) code is as follows:

class D2W {
...

    static {
        ...
NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().addObserver(factory(), new NSSelector("willCheckRules", _NotificationArray), "WORequestHandlerDidHandleRequestNotification", null);
    }
...
};

But the requestWasHandled method is registered indirectly (why!?) through an inner class:

class D2W {
...

    public class _Observer
    {

        public void requestWasHandled(NSNotification n)
        {
            Object object = n.object();
            if(object instanceof WOContext)
                D2W.factory().requestWasHandled((WOContext)object);
        }

        final D2W this$0;

        public _Observer()
        {
            this$0 = D2W.this;
            super();
        }
    }

...
    private void _enableTracking()
    {
        if(!_trackingEnabled)
        {
            Object trackingObserver = new _Observer();
NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().addObserver(trackingObserver, new NSSelector("requestWasHandled", new Class[] {
                com/webobjects/foundation/NSNotification
            }), "WORequestHandlerDidHandleRequestNotification", null);
            _trackingEnabled = true;
        }
    }
...
};


By dropping into the Eclipse debugger on NSNotificationCenter and stepping through until it finally fills in its targets stack variable I was able to inspect the contents and determine that the target object which should be an instance of D2W._Observer is instead null. I suspect that the NSNotificationCenter must therefore only weakly reference its targets such that it does not keep them from getting garbage collected. I'm reasonably sure that's an intentional design and is certainly a good thing in light of the recent story about the university students competing in the DARPA challenge who were oh so surprised when they found a "memory leak" in their .NET app because their notification center was referencing its targets.

I am able to fix this by adding a D2W._Observer ivar to my Application class and basically using the above code from the _enableTracking() method except setting the ivar to the new _Observer instance rather than using a stack variable. With that code in place I am once again able to use the Customize button from my D2W app.

Of course I still haven't gotten WOLips to tell WebAssistant to save the file to the source code directory (it saves to the bundled copy which gets overwritten on the next build) but it's progress nonetheless.

Has anyone else seen this bug or reported it? Should I go ahead and do that? It seems to me that the simple fix is to just add a requestWasHandled(NSNotification) overload directly to D2W rather than using an inner class.

-Dave

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