Hi Marty,
Maybe I didn't express myself correctly, but I was asking for
the scenario in which the client doesn´t know
a priori the
details about the server that it wants to monitor (e.g. it might
be a thermometer, a power supply, a fan, an antenna, etc). So I
am not able to create the request as you suggested:
PVStructure
pvRequest(CreateRequest::createRequest("value,alarm,timeStamp,display,control,valueAlarm"));
Because beside those generic fields a fan can also have others
like "speed", "power", etc. which might be different from the
fields of an antenna (position, angle, etc). In this scenario,
the solution I propose is to send a null request that returns
the whole PVStructure of the server to the client. Then the
client should determine if the data was received from an
antenna, a fan, a thermometer or a power supply so it can
react accordingly. To do this the metadata support is very
useful, because it would work like XML, the client might
understand the message from and unknown server.
So the question is:
Can a client use metadata to understand a message from an
unknown server? (known as dynamic communication)
Or the software developer has to known the structure of the
server to make the client (static communication)