Suggestion : Protocol Message Designer

[StevePinfold]

Hi EA.

I would like to suggest a feature to add into EA which would be really neat.

I would like you to add a protocol message designer which would be similar to a table with headings such as

    Index    Size    Description     Defined Values
    ====    ===   ========    ===========

And from this I could define a set of messages between 2 nodes as a byte array. The neat bit would be the code generator side of this as it could generate code for different languages (C# etc).

This is a similar feature to IDL (Interface definitioin language) which is used for DDS etc.

An example table would be

    Index    Size    Description     Defined Values
    ====   ===   ========   ===========
       0          2      Header ID         1 = Command
                                                  2 = Response
       2          2      Length              value between 2 & 65534
       4          1      Param              etc


This could be used by system designers to define the interface in EA as opposed to in word, and then generate the docs and code direct from EA.

Thanks in advance

Steve

[g.makulik]

You can easily achieve s.th. like this by defining an appropriate UML profile and transformation or code generation templates.
I did so successfully for the http://code.google.com/p/protobuf protocol language (which in turn provides code generation for several progamming languages with it's own compiler).

This feature doesn't need to be implemented into the UML tool natively.

Best regards,
Günther