Describing data to be exchanged.
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Detailed Description
Describing data to be exchanged.
Since GRAS takes care of potential representation conversion when the platform is heterogeneous, any data which transits on the network must be described beforehand.
There is several possible interfaces for this, ranging from the really completely automatic parsing to completely manual. Let's study each of them from the simplest to the more advanced:
- Section Basic operations on data descriptions presents how to retrieve and use an already described type.
- Section Automatic parsing of data descriptions shows how to get GRAS parsing your type description automagically. This is unfortunately not always possible (only works for some structures), but if it is for your data, this is definitly the way to go.
- Section Simple manual data description presents how to build a description manually. This is useful when you want to describe an array or a pointer of pre-defined structures.
- You sometimes need to exchange informations between descriptions at send or receive time. This is for example useful when your structure contains an array which size is given by another field of the structure.