Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Autogenerating dissectors ...
On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 06:19:00AM +0900, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> 1. The info to display in the summary pane. In the past I have used simple
> stuff here, like request or response, but this is really not satisfactory.
>
> As an aside, we should have a standard on what is expected here. It is
> possible to summarize the contents of the tree view here, as I have done
> with more recent dissectors.
I think it's probably a good idea to provide some sort of summary
information in the Info column, although I'm not sure that one can
standardize much beyond that - in many protocols, it's probably
impossible to show *all* the information in the tree view without
requiring the user to have a 160000x1024 display (or requiring one-pixel
fonts), so the dissector writer will have to choose which fields are
most important.
> 2. Generate code in the dissector to always dissect the packets fully
> according to the protocol description
If that means doing all the work that a tree view would require, except
for the calls to "proto_tree_add_...()", that might be overkill - I'd
prefer to have it, if the "tree" argument is null, do as little work as
necessary, i.e. do only what's needed to
1) fill in the summary columns.
2) build any state information needed;
3) call any sub-dissectors.
