Ok, I see. That’s tricky.
2nd try:
You could box-ize your "server" (the nobox one) object, and put an instance of it in your device. The server object contains something like this (forum coding):
typedef struct _my_server_obj {
t_obj m_ob;
/* ... */
struct _my_server_obj **active_copy_ref;
} t_my_server_obj;
t_my_server_obj *active_copy = NULL; // this is a class variable
// ... in the constructor:
x->active_copy_ref = &active_copy;
The constructor of your client object deferlows a call to a function doing the following: looks in its own patcher for the server object; looks at the server’s active_copy (you can retrieve it from the object structure); if it’s non-NULL, then the global server object will be *active_copy; if it’s not (because this device is the first being instantiated), then the server object of this device will be the global server, and active_copy will point to it. As a matter of fact, you instantiate n servers and use only one of them; but this might not be a big problem, if they don’t take up a lot of memory and their initialization is not too complex.
Of course I might be overlooking something, as I don’t know the full scenario…
hth
aa
