[evla-sw-discuss] ASDM

[Barry Clark]

It occurs to me that propagating an incomplete (A)SDM through the 
software system 
ObservingTool -> Executor -> DCAF -> Archive,
having each piece fill in the things it knows about, would be a good
way to organize things.  This will ensure that there is a path from
appropriate places into the Archive for everything.  Starting down this
path now will give us a leg up on the eventual system, and will provide
a useful bit of non-throwaway code in the implementation of the 
interim system we are now coding for the VLA correlator.

The effort which I understand to now be underway to provide an XML schema
for the ASDM will make it easy to deal with such a thing.  The incomplete
(A)SDM would be passed from program to program as an XML document,
and unmarshalled into a java object (or C struct if we need that), 
via JAXB for java (and similar things are available for C).  The additional
things that element knows about would be inserted into the object, and
the object marshalled into an XML document for shipment on to the next
element.

If we go with the ASDM schema, we might like a little feedback into 
the process of constructing it.  Primary need would be to make many 
(most?) elements optional, so the incomplete object can be passed around 
without having to have upstream elements insert dummies for things they 
shouldn't have to understand.