Configuration Builders in DarkRift

I think most people know that you can host a DarkRift server within your own .NET application fairly easily. There’s essentially three steps to it:

• Create a ServerSpawnData object with any settings you want your server to start with
• Optionally create a ClusterSpawnData if you plan on using the server clustering features
• Create a DarkRiftServer object with the above objects

This is demonstrated very well in the console server’s code, which after all is just a console application hosting a DarkRift server.

The two spawn data objects are most commonly created from XML using their CreateFromXml methods as it’s much easier to read the configuration you’re putting into the server in a configuration format rather than in C#, particularly because the horrific structure of the objects tends to mean you end up with some garish code like this:

var serverSpawnData = new ServerSpawnData();

serverSpawnData.PluginsSettings.PluginSettings pluginSettings = new ServerSpawnData.PluginsSettings.PluginSettings
{
    Type = "MyPlugin",
    Load = true
};

serverSpawnData.Plugins.Plugins.Add(pluginSettings);

return new DarkRiftServer(serverSpawnData);

Configuration Builder Objects

With the next release of DarkRift (or I suppose current release, if you’re building from source) DarkRift adds two new objects to make this all a little easier: DarkRiftServerConfigurationBuilder and DarkRiftClusterConfigurationBuilder.

These two objects provide a fluent interface to build DarkRift servers with:

var builder = DarkRiftServerConfigurationBuilder.Create()
                                                .AddPlugin("MyPlugin");

return new DarkRiftServer(builder.ServerSpawnData);

Where the spawn data objects are based around the XML configuration structure, and map almost 1-1 to it, the configuration builders are designed around the actual changes you may want to make to the configuration. For example, there are methods to add a plugin, add a log writer, set the advertised host/port; all of which make configuring a DarkRift server from code less awful:

var serverSpawnData = new ServerSpawnData();

serverSpawnData.PluginsSettings.PluginSettings pluginSettings = new ServerSpawnData.PluginsSettings.PluginSettings
{
    Type = "MyPlugin",
    Load = true
};

serverSpawnData.Plugins.Plugins.Add(pluginSettings);

serverSpawnData.LoggingSettings.LogWriterSettings logWriterSettings = new ServerSpawnData.LoggingSettings.LogWriterSettings
{
    Name = "LogWriter1",
    Type = "ConsoleWriter",
    LogLevels = new LogType[] { LogType.Info, LogType.Warning, LogType.Error, LogType.Fatal }
};

serverSpawnData.Logging.LogWriters.Add(logWriterSettings);

serverSpawnData.Server.ServerGroup = "Group1"
serverSpawnData.ServerRegistry.AdvertisedHost = "localhost";
serverSpawnData.ServerRegistry.AdvertisedPort = 4296;

return new DarkRiftServer(serverSpawnData);

And more intuitive:

var builder = DarkRiftServerConfigurationBuilder.Create()
                                                .AddPlugin("MyPlugin")
                                                .AddLogWriter("LogWriter1", "ConsoleWriter", LogType.Info, LogType.Warning, LogType.Error, LogType.Fatal)
                                                .WithServerGroup("Group1")
                                                .WithAdvertisedHost("localhost")
                                                .WithAdvertisedPort(4296);

return new DarkRiftServer(builder.ServerSpawnData);