Message forwarding in Smalltalk

Question

So I'm writing an application where one object has a bunch of delegate objects that it forwards messages to. The idea is that I can say

someObject sendMessage:aMessage

and aMessage will be sent to all of someObject's delegates (for any value of aMessage). The only way I've been able to do this is something like:

sendMessage:aMessage

| sel chunks kwords arglist msg |
chunks := aMessage findTokens:' '.
kwords := Array new:(chunks size).
arglist := Array new:(chunks size).
1 to: (chunks size) do: [:i | 
    kwords at:i put:((chunks at:i) findTokens:':') at:1.
    arglist at:i put:((chunks at:i) findTokens:':') at:2].
sel := ''.
kwords do:[:word | sel := sel,word,':'].

msg := Message selector:sel arguments:arglist.
delegates do:[:del | del perform:msg selector with:msg arguments].

It works, but there has to be a better way. This solution limits the arguments to being strings, and is just plain ugly. Does anyone know a cleaner, better way to forward messages?

BTW, I'm using squeak, but an implementation-independent solution would be prefered ;)

EDIT: I should add that the delegates are of the same class as the object, so I can't just override DoesNotUnderstand:.

Answer 1

Since you want to pass objects in as arguments, you'll have to pass them in as a separate list of using a message pattern like the following:

someObject sendMessage: aSelector withArguments: argumentList

Then you'd implement #sendMessage:withArguments: as:

sendMessage: aSelector withArguments: argumentList

delegates do:[:del | del perform: aSelector withArguments: :argumentList].

and you'd be able to forward arbitrarily complex messages using real objects as args:

| arguments |

arguments := Array with: Object new with: 1234.5 with: ('key'->'value').

someObject sendMessage: #foo:bar:baz: withArguments: arguments

I think this is portable to most dialects as well...