Communication Interfaces

Besides the usual interactive usage of MIDAS it should also be possible to employ the services and utilities provided by MIDAS from other processes. These processes (the clients) reside either on the same Unix system as the process executing the MIDAS session (the server) or on a different system in a network. Therefore, a set of ``Communication Interfaces''   has been implemented which is described in this chapter.

The routines consist again of a name of six characters (all capital letters), where the first two characters are XC . The next character indicates the functionality which is addressed by the routine. Currently these are:

• X for establishing, controlling and closing the connection  to a MIDAS server;
• C for sending commands to a MIDAS server ;
• K for accessing the keywords  of a MIDAS server;

The final three characters describe the functionality of the routine.

Note

These interfaces are only implemented in the C language and for the Unix environment. It is, also, the very first implementation of these interfaces. Therefore, we reserve the right to modify the calling sequence of them in the future, if necessary.

Below and in the same order we give a general description and explanation of the various interfaces. Refer to Appendix for the detailed calling sequence of each routine mentioned below.

The functionality supported by these interfaces is provided to the interactive user of MIDAS via the commands CONNECT/BACKGROUND, DISCONNECT/BACKGROUND. The help text of these commands gives more detailed information about the communication among different MIDAS sessions as well as pointers to related commands.