Determine which addon calls a function

[Haleth]

Hello.

I've got a simple question but I'm not sure if there is a solution.

I'm making an addon which is to serve as a framework. It has a an API function in its namespace with parameters which any addon will be able to call. Like this:

myAddon = {}

function myAddon:myFunction(arg1, arg2)
	-- do things
end

What I want to know is, is it possible to find out which addon calls the function, and get information about that addon, e.g. using GetAddOnMetadata()? All I need to know is the name, so that I can use this name in the function.

This could be done manually of course, and anyone using the function would simple have to pass the name as a parameter. But that can contain typos or simply be wrong. I want to protect the API function from screwing up because of bad usage in other addons.

[Vlad]

I found this, but nothing that works in WoW atm, maybe there are some equivalent API?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...lling-function

[Haleth]

Good idea - I found a debugstack() function by sniffing around in Blizzard_DebugTools. I'll test it and see if I can do what I tried with it.

[Foxlit]

Originally Posted by Haleth What I want to know is, is it possible to find out which addon calls the function, and get information about that addon, e.g. using GetAddOnMetadata()?

No, there is no reliable way to do that. Furthermore, having your library behave differently depending on which addon calls it is a horrible idea.

[Haleth]

I simply want to display the name of the addon calling it - the function won't behave differently.

[Haleth]

Here we go:

local _, _, name = strsplit("\\", debugstack(2))

Placing this inside a function returns the name of the folder in which said function was called. Crude, but seems to work.

[Foxlit]

As long as your function is only called directly from another addon's code -- loadstring() and any library-provided pcall/xpcall-equivalents will result in incorrect values.

[Torhal]

Originally Posted by Haleth myAddon = {} function myAddon:myFunction(arg1, arg2) -- do things end

Blizzard already creates a table for you.

-- Put this at the top of your file
local folderName, myAddon = ...

You'll get a string which is the name of the folder your AddOn lives in (and I use as the display name for the AddOn itself) and a table which is shared between all of the files in the AddOn itself.

[Haleth]

Foxlit; Good point. Perhaps I should make sure that the previous return of the split is "AddOns".

Torhal; I used a bad example, my bad. I don't really create a table - I make one frame, assign a name to it, and use that name as the table. Then people will be able to easily access both the visual part (onscreen frame) as well as the internal part.

[SDPhantom]

If a line is too long, debugstack() will truncate the beginning of it and add an ellipsis. There is no way to prevent it from doing so.

I've been working on a similar function for a new version of Spydon that'll provide a stack trace on every addon message sent out and for every prefix registration. I originally planned to have it return the name of the addon that called the respective function, but in dealing with framework/library code, I had to fallback to a full stack trace.