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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Planning the next major release

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2015 15:37:01 -0700
On Jun 4, 2015, at 2:58 PM, Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> We've made a lot of progress but are still lacking many features including
> the Wireless Toolbar, a few Statistics dialogs,

More than just a few, actually.  "Service Response Time" isn't a dialog, it's a menu under which a lot of other menu items for statistics dialogs exists.

What we should ultimately have is a mechanism by which a dissector can provide statistics tables, with common UI code presenting the tables - that way, the XYZZYP Service Response Time table can be shown in printed text form by TShark and GUI form by Qt Wireshark (and GTK+ Wireshark if we don't just delete the GTK+ code) and so on.

I've worked on that every so often; that's a lot of the reason for the stuff I've added to epan/stat_tap_ui.h, and I'd like to get to the point where a tap can say "OK, here's the -z flag name, and here's where my menu item goes and what it's name is, and here are the parameters you can specify", and have the -z option be parsed by common code and have the parameters part of the dialog window be laid out and handled by common code".

After that, there should be a way in which a tap can say "OK, my presentation is a set of tables ("set" because, for example, the SMB SRT statistics has three tables, with request types and transaction types as keys), with these names, and these sets of columns, with these column names and types".  The stats tree stuff is a bit more specialized than that, as it has a fixed set of columns.  You could perhaps use a general "set of tables" mechanism, if the table rows can be expanded, to implement both the stats tree stuff and the SRT tables and perhaps other statistics taps.  "stats tree" statistics can already be done without writing any GUI code; this would let a bunch of other statistics be written that way as well.