Receiving Completion Indications

Several options are available for receiving completion indications, thus providing applications with appropriate levels of flexibility. These include: waiting (or blocking) on event objects, polling event objects, and socket I/O completion routines.

Blocking and Waiting for Completion Indication

Applications can block while waiting for one or more event objects to become set using the WSAWaitForMultipleEvents function. In Win32 implementations, the process or thread will truly block. Since Windows Sockets 2 event objects are implemented as Win32 events, the native Win32 function, WaitForMultipleObjects can also be used for this purpose. This is especially useful if the thread needs to wait on both socket and nonsocket events.

Polling for Completion Indication

Applications that prefer not to block can use the WSAGetOverlappedResult function to poll for the completion status associated with any particular event object. This function indicates whether or not the overlapped operation has completed, and if completed, arranges for the WSAGetLastError function to retrieve the error status of the overlapped operation.

Using socket I/O completion routines

The functions used to initiate overlapped I/O (WSASend, WSASendTo, WSARecv, WSARecvFrom) all take lpCompletionRoutine as an optional input parameter. This is a pointer to an application-specific function that will be called after a successfully initiated overlapped I/O operation was completed (successfully or otherwise). The completion routine follows the same rules as stipulated for Win32 file I/O completion routines. That is, the completion routine will not be invoked until the thread is in an alertable wait state, such as when the function WSAWaitForMultipleEvents is invoked with the fAlertable flag set. An application that uses the completion routine option for a particular overlapped I/O request may not use the "wait" option of WSAGetOverlappedResult for that same overlapped I/O request.

The transports allow an application to invoke send and receive operations from within the context of the socket I/O completion routine and guarantee that, for a given socket, I/O completion routines will not be nested. This permits time-sensitive data transmissions to occur entirely within a preemptive context.

Summary of overlapped completion indication mechanisms

The particular overlapped I/O completion indication to be used for a given overlapped operation is determined by whether the application supplies a pointer to a completion function, whether a WSAOVERLAPPED structure is referenced, and by the value of the hEvent member within the WSAOVERLAPPED structure (if supplied). The following table summarizes the completion semantics for an overlapped socket and shows the various combinations of lpOverlapped, hEvent, and lpCompletionRoutine: