darkfi/doc/src/learn/dchat/creating-dchat/ui.md

Slap on a UI

We'll create a new method called menu() inside the Dchat implementation. It implements a highly simple UI that allows a user to send messages and see received messages inside the inbox. Our inbox simply displays the messages that ProtocolDchat has saved in the DchatMsgBuffer.

Here's what it should look like:

{{#include ../../../../../example/dchat/src/main.rs:menu}}

We'll call menu() inside of dchat::start() along with our other methods, like so:

    async fn start(&mut self, ex: Arc<Executor<'_>>) -> Result<()> {
        let ex2 = ex.clone();

        self.register_protocol(self.recv_msgs.clone()).await?;
        self.p2p.clone().start(ex.clone()).await?;
        self.p2p.clone().run(ex.clone()).await?;

        self.menu().await?;

        self.p2p.stop().await;
        Ok(())
    }

But wait- if you try running this code, you'll notice that the menu never gets displayed. That's because we call .await on the previous function call, p2p.run(). p2p.run() is a loop that runs until we exit the program, so in order for it to not block other threads from executing we'll need to detach it in the background.

The complete implementaion looks like this:

{{#include ../../../../../example/dchat/src/main.rs:start}}