When you issue asynchronous I/O, the completion function or the I/O completion port receives, among other things, a pointer to the OVERLAPPED structure that the I/O was originally issued against. And that is your key to golden riches.

If you need to associate information with the I/O operation, there’s no obvious place to put it, so some people end up doing things like maintaining a master table which records all outstanding overlapped I/O as well as the additional information associated with that I/O. When each I/O completes, they look up the I/O in the master table to locate that additional information.

But it’s easier than that.

Since the OVERLAPPED structure is passed by address, you can store your additional information alongside the OVERLAPPED structure:

// in C
struct OVERLAPPEDEX {
 OVERLAPPED o;
 CClient *AssociatedClient;
 CLIENTSTATE ClientState;
};
// or in C++
struct OVERLAPPEDEX : OVERLAPPED {
 CClient *AssociatedClient;
 CLIENTSTATE ClientState;
};

When the I/O completes, you can use the CONTAINING_RECORD macro or just static_cast the LPOVERLAPPED to OVERLAPPEDEX* and bingo, there’s your extra information right there. Of course, you have to know that the I/O that completed is one that was issued against an OVERLAPPEDEX structure instead of a plain OVERLAPPED structure, but there are ways of keeping track of that. If you’re using a completion function, then only use an OVERLAPPEDEX-aware completion function when the OVERLAPPED structure is part of an OVERLAPPEDEX structure. If you’re using an I/O completion port, then you can use the completion key or the OVERLAPPED.hEvent to distinguish OVERLAPPEDEX asynchronous I/O from boring OVERLAPPED I/O.