How to send signal to running gtk process

Question

I'm making a gtk application in C that once executed, I want to be able to somehow contact the process (hopefully from python) and tell it to execute a function. I have everything else working, just need some way to execute a function from outside the process.

Current main (based on gtk tutorial):

int
main (int    argc,
      char **argv)
{
  GtkApplication *app;
  int status;
  app = gtk_application_new(NULL, G_APPLICATION_FLAGS_NONE);


  custom_setup();
  g_signal_connect (app, "activate", G_CALLBACK (activate), NULL);

  status = g_application_run (G_APPLICATION (app), NULL, NULL);
  g_object_unref (app);

  return status;
}

Thank you.

Answer 1

Your app will have to expose a DBus interface to other apps, with a method they can call which executes your function.

A nice shortcut to doing this is to add a GAction to your app, which is described here. Then other apps can call the org.gtk.Actions.Activate DBus method to activate the GAction and execute your function.