Using the Cups c api I am able to see the state of a printer (such as paused, printing, jammed ect.) What I am trying to do now is to listen for, or lock against a change in a printer's state. Ultimately I want a live view of a printers state, but I don't want to have a delay loop spamming cups with printer attribute requests.
I have seen many functions and tags in the source code and documentation that hint towards some kind of event system, but I have been unable to figure out how to utilize it. Any help is welcome, even just pointing me towards the right function.
I used this example in my current implementation to get state information. http://cups-dev.easysw.narkive.com/9RO0OBnZ/how-to-get-printer-status-via-cups-api
It ends up this was a very complex question and involved a lot of work to figure out. The only sane way I found to listen for changes was to use the rss notification system. I would advise against attempting to make your own notification module, I wasted a week of my life trying that (I'm not even sure it is possible anymore). Use the Create-Printer-Subscription with a uri like rss://localhost:8000. You will of course need a listener waiting for the xml data.
I put up an a simple debugging tool I made with java/jna here. Select 2 to set up a subscription, you will need to listen for the data yourself though.