Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] More and more need to access dissection routines from all ove

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From: "John McDermott" <jjm@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 15:02:01 -0600

Michael Tuexen wrote:
> Richard,
>
> regarding the COL_INFO stuff I would like to say that protocols
> running over SCTP have to deal with the fact that multiple
> upper layer protocol data can be part of one SCTP packet. Since the
> dissector and most of the upper layers are written by myself it
> was easy to only use append instead of set for the COL_INFO stuff.
>
> But it would be helpful is this could be handled 'automatically'.
> Maybe a protocol can set the COL_INFO stuff in a state: ONLY_APPEND
> where even set calls are modified to APPEND, or DONT_MODIFY where
> append and set calls are simply ignored.

One probelem I see with all of this is that the COL_INFO data has
sometimes become very, very long.  Two examples are the (SMB) BROWSER
entries and some DNS responses when there are lots of addresses. One
thought, but it would be much more work, might be to only put basic
info in the actual row and use tooltips to show the longer info.
That way one could say
	FOO 2 entries: BAR left  BAZ right
or whatever the encapsulated protocols need to show, and then use the
tips (or some other mechanism) for the longer data.

I'm not wedded to tooltips, but I wanted to spur discussion.

--john

--
John McDermott
Writer, Educator, Consultant
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