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During the creation of a communicator, the Ice run time initializes a number of features that affect the communicator's operation. Once set, these features remain in effect for the life time of the communicator, that is, you cannot change these features after you have created a communicator. Therefore, if you want to customize these features, you must do so when you create the communicator.

The following features can be customized at communicator creation time:

• the property set
• the logger object
• the statistics object
• the narrow and wide string converters (C++ only)
• the thread notification hook
• the dispatcher
• the class loader (Java only)

To establish these features, you initialize a structure or class of type InitializationData with the relevant settings. For C++ the structure is defined as follows:

{zcode:cpp}
namespace Ice {
    struct InitializationData {
        PropertiesPtr properties;
        LoggerPtr logger;
        StatsPtr stats;
        StringConverterPtr stringConverter;
        WstringConverterPtr wstringConverter;
        ThreadNotificationPtr threadHook;
        DispatcherPtr dispatcher;
    };
}
{zcode}

For languages other than C++, InitializationData is a class with all data members public. (The data members supported by this class vary with each language mapping.)

For C++, Ice::initialize is overloaded as follows:

{zcode:cpp}
namespace Ice {
    CommunicatorPtr initialize(int&, char*[],
                const InitializationData& = InitializationData(),
                Int = ICE_INT_VERSION);
    CommunicatorPtr initialize(StringSeq&,
                const InitializationData& = InitializationData(),
                Int = ICE_INT_VERSION);
    CommunicatorPtr initialize(
                const InitializationData& = InitializationData()
                Int = ICE_INT_VERSION);
}
{zcode}

The versions of initialize that accept an argument vector look for Ice-specific command-line options and remove them from the argument vector, as described in the C++ language mapping. The version without an argc/argv pair is useful if you want to prevent property settings for a program from being changed by command-line arguments — you can use the Properties interface for this purpose.

To set a feature, you set the corresponding field in the InitializationData structure and pass the structure to initialize. For example, to establish a custom logger of type MyLogger, you can use:

{zcode}
Ice::InitializationData id;
id.logger = new MyLoggerI;
Ice::CommunicatorPtr ic = Ice::initialize(argc, argv, id);
{zcode}

For Java, C#, and Objective-C, Ice.Util.initialize is overloaded similarly (as is Ice.initialize for Python, Ice::initialize for Ruby, and Ice_initialize for PHP), so you can pass an InitializationData instance either with or without an argument vector.

Note that you must supply an argument vector if you want initialize to look for a configuration file in the ICE_CONFIG environment variable.

See Also

• The Server-Side main Function in C++
• The Server-Side main Function in Objective-C
• Command-Line Parsing and Initialization
• The Properties Interface