Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] dissector newbie needs some guidence..

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 08:21:46AM -0700, Kelly Byrd wrote:
> - It looks as though the requests aren't identified as DAAP (I change
> the protocol column, early in the dissection), on the responses. Could
> this be because there isn't any data in the request body to pass to my
> dissector?

That's probably it.  There's a special-case hack for setting the column
for SSDP; perhaps that should be generalized.

> - Are there (even ad-hoc) style guidelines on how the dissector should
> output it's text? DAAP is a list of tags, some of which are containers
> containing more tags. In practice, the recursion doesn't seem to go
> more than a couple of levels. It feels like a subtree for each tag is
> the right display. My concern is that a given response will
> contain a lot of subtrees, is there any reason not to do this?

That's how I'd do it.

> - Another subtee question. Is there any way to change the
> text display based on whether or not a subtree is expanded?
> 
> Example:
> 
> Unexpanded tree:
> 
> + Tag: asar (size:16, data: [Some Random Band])
> 
> expanded tree:
> -Tag: asar
> |-Size: 16
> |-Data: Some Random Band

No, there's no way to do that - but I don't see any harm in

	+ Tag: asar (size:16, data: [Some Random Band])
	|-Size: 16
	|-Data: Some Random Band