I agree 100%
In my view we should never use hidden fields.
There is in my opinion a very good practical and useability reason for
not using hidden fields:
There are now so many fields managed by Ethereal so it is just not
ptractical to go look in the list-of-fields list.
Therefore the only way to find out about fields are by looking at
where they are used in the decode pane.
So I would suggest something like this for the checksum field :
Make Checksum an expansion
- Checksum 0x1234 (correct)
[boolean flag field]
Let the boolean field under checksum be a GENERATED field and let it
be one out of these four :
tcp.checksum.good [TCP Checksum is good]
tcp.checksum.bad [TCP Checksum is wrong]
tcp.checksum.disabled [TCP checksum checking is disabled in
preferences and not checked]
tcp.checksum.short_packet [TCP checksum is not checked since the
packet is short]
In the same way I think IP SRV and IP DST should be an expansion and show
the hidden field ip.addr as a generated field inside that expansion.
This makes it possible to see and learn about these useful fields by
just looking at real packets in the decode pane.
On 7/8/05, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi List!
>
> I'm currently looking at the checksum protocol fields. For example, the TCP
> checksum will usually look like:
>
> Checksum: 0x5424 [correct]
>
> and if it's bad:
>
> Checksum: 0x5424 [incorrect, should be 0x1234]
>
> In this case, a hidden boolean field is added to be able to filter on this
> item (e.g. to see only "bad checksummed" packets).
>
> Question: Why do we hide this field at all?
>
> I don't see any good reason to hide this (and alike) fields. If someone
> wants to use it, he must *know* that it's available and must *know* it's
> name. This doesn't seem to be very intuitive.
>
> Is there any reason I'm too blind to see?
>
> IMO this field should be visible and marked as generated, so it will look
> like: [Bad Checksum: True]
>
> Regards, ULFL
>
> P.S: The same *may* apply to most (all?) other hidden fields as well?!?
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