Hi,
I'm working on a dissector for about a month and some questions came up
when doing more than just basic dissection of the packets:
1) The protocol consists mainly of two different types of packets:
configuration frames and data frames. Configuration frames are send at
the beginning of a transmission or when the configuration of the sending
device changes and describe the content and format of data frames.
Without the knowledge out of the configuration frames, the data frames
can't be dissected.
So I created a struct, called config_frame to save the information of
the configuration frames and put these config_frames into a global
GArray. This global array is (re)initialized in my dissectors init
function and pinfo->fd->num (also saved in config_frame) is used to
ensure that every configuration frame just adds one config_frame struct
to the array. When the dissector comes to a data frame, he searches
through that global array for a matching config_frame and uses it to
dissect the data frame. Is that the right way to do that?
2) What are the ett_... values for? Section 1.6.2 of README.developer
explains how to initialize and use them, but I didn't get what they are
good for. Is it save to pass the same ett_ variable multiple times? (The
data in the data frames is nested and I do that, didn't have a problem
so far)
3) To understand the sequence in that the "proto_register_...", the
"proto_reg_handoff_...", the init and the dissect functions are called,
I put the following at the beginning of the dissect function:
printf("dissect(): %s\n", (!tree ? "*tree null" : "*tree valid"));
and always get "*tree valid". Do i need a special configure switch to
enable the "Operational dissection" (enable something like a release
build)?
Thanks,
Jens
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Jens Steinhauser (Mr.), Software Dude
Tel.: +43 5523 507 422, Fax.: +43 5523 507 999
http://www.omicron.at/ jens.steinhauser AT omicron.at
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OMICRON electronics GmbH, Oberes Ried 1
A-6833 Klaus / Austria
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