Implementing an Advise Sink Object

Applies to: Office 2010 | Outlook 2010 | Visual Studio

A client can either implement its own advise sink objects or use a utility function, HrAllocAdviseSink. HrAllocAdviseSink creates an advise sink object with an implementation of OnNotify that invokes a callback function.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using HrAllocAdviseSink. It can save work, but it provides no control over reference counting the advise sink object that it creates. Therefore, clients that need to carefully control their advise sink's release or that have interdependencies between their advise sink and another client object should construct their own IMAPIAdviseSink implementation and avoid using HrAllocAdviseSink altogether.

A client implementing its own advise sink should make it an independent object not related to or dependent upon any other objects so as to eliminate potential complications in reference counting and object release. However, if you must implement your advise sink as part of another object or include a back pointer to another object as a data member, it is recommended that two separate reference counts be maintained: one for the object referenced by the advise sink and one for the advise sink.

When the reference count of the referenced object falls to zero, all of its methods can fail and its vtable can be destroyed, but the memory for the advise sink must remain intact until after its reference count also falls to zero. This means that the advise sink's Release method must decrement its reference count and finish destroying the object when that count reaches zero. If two separate reference counts are not maintained, it would be easy to inadvertently destroy the advise sink as part of the encompassing object's Release process.

Clients using HrAllocAdviseSink to implement an advise sink must be equally careful not to include their callback function as a method in another advise sink object. For C++ clients, it is tempting to do this and pass the this pointer as a parameter. This is a dangerous strategy because clients typically free an object when its reference count reaches zero. Freeing the memory for the advise sink object would render the this pointer invalid.

Depending on the type of event and the advise source, your OnNotify method can handle events in various ways. The following table offers suggestions in how to handle some of the standard events.