OpenSplice C# API  v6.x
OpenSplice C# Data Distribution Service Data-Centric Publish-Subscribe API
C# DCPS API

Table of Contents

About the C# Reference Guide

The C# Reference Guide provides details of the Vortex OpenSplice (Subscription Paradigm for the Logical Interconnection of Concurrent Engines) Application Programming Interfaces for the C# language.

The C# Reference Guide describes the Data Centric Publish Subscribe (DCPS) layer. The purpose of the DCPS is the distribution of data (publish/subscribe). The structure of the DCPS is divided into five modules. Each module consists of several classes, which in turn generally contain several operations.

Getting started

See the DDS Tutorial (pdf) for more information about the DDS specification and usage, which is a good starting point if you don't know much about DDS yet.

If you are new to C# we would recommend that you start by looking at the example code provided in your Vortex OpenSplice installation directory as well as the documentation in the sections below.

A summary of each example, along with build instructions can be found on the Examples page.

How to use the C# API

The API is currently compiled on the Windows platform using Microsoft's C# compiler. The resulting deliverable is a library file called dcpssacsAssembly.dll, which you can find in the OSPL_HOME%/bin directory alongside all the other Vortex OpenSplice product libraries.

Since the DLL is a managed assembly, it is not found by Windows using the normal PATH environment variable. In order for the .NET framework to find a library, this library must either be copied to the same directory location as the executable that tries to load it, or the library must be copied into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). For details about the global assembly cache, and how to manage it, see the Wikipedia Global Assembly Cache information.

The C# API is very similar to the other language bindings, with a couple of exceptions:

  • The C# API satisfies the C# coding conventions, meaning that:
  • All interfaces start with the 'I' character.
  • All operations are written in CamelBack notation ('CreateTopic' instead of 'create_topic')
  • Class-Attributes are not implemented by explicit getter operations, but by C# properties.
  • The C# API introduces operation overloading: many operations have multiple versions with different parameters:
  • Choose the operation with the minimum amount of parameters that fits your need.
  • Parameters that are not passed are set to their default values.
  • This removes the need for some of the special purpose macro's that represent default values for parameters.
  • Constants have been defined in the classes they refer to.
  • For example: the DURATION_INFINITE is a constant called 'Infinite' in the struct Duration.

To generate a C# data model from your Topic IDL definitions, use idlpp in the following way: 

    idlpp -l cs -S < IDL_FILE >

Here, 'cs' represents the Csharp language, and -S represents the fact that there is no dependency on any ORB. See also 'idlpp -h'.

Current limitations of the C# API

  • idlpp is not able to generate the correct C# representation for IDL unions.
  • Datatypes generated by idlpp are not always initialized to valid default values. For example, an array of strings is initialized to a string array holding 'null' pointers, which you need to assign manually before you can write the contents of your sample into the DDS.