Namespace com.ibm.streams.teda.parser.binary
SPL standard and specialized toolkits > com.ibm.streams.teda 1.0.2 > com.ibm.streams.teda.parser.binary
Because most telecommunications network data is available only in binary data formats, the Telecommunications Event Data Analytics toolkit includes parser operators that can parse binary-encoded data. These operators generate streams of decoded tuples.
Definition Documents
The parser operators must know the composition of the fixed-size data or ASN.1 structures. These compositions are specified in Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) or XML documents. The specification documents are separate from the SPL application for two primary reasons:
- A structure definition is often complex, detailed, and vendor-specific, but it is often stable, too. For example, a mobile network element produces call detail records using the same data composition as long as its software version does not change. Keeping the structure definition separate from the SPL program code allows the user to build and maintain a library of structure definitions and to reuse these structure definitions for different use cases, for many operator instances, in single or multiple applications.
- One type of user understands the details of the input data and its layout, and another type of user develops SPL applications. Separating the structure definition from the SPL application allows for different roles in the development process.
The StructureParse operator requires two XML documents, the description of the data structures in the input stream and the mapping information of binary data fields to SPL output attributes. For both types of XML documents, two XSD (XML Schema Definition) files exist under the etc/xsd toolkit directory, StructureParseStructure.xsd and StructureParseMapping.xsd. These files can be used together with an XML editor to simplify XML document creation.
The ASN1Parse operator requires one ASN.1 grammar document, which describes the format of the input data.
Operators
- ASN1Parse: The ASN1Parse operator parses a binary data stream that contains ASN.1-encoded data, extracts parts of the data, and sends the data as tuples to downstream operators.
- StructureParse: The StructureParse operator parses a binary data stream, which contains fixed-size structures; therefore, the data is passed in using a blob attribute.