Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Generating the packet-dcerpc-*.c dissectors ...

[Richard Sharpe <rsharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Samba 4 now has a lot of working IDL code for a lot of interfaces, and I 
have started looking at automatically generating Ethereal dissectors from 
that. 

While I have some work to do yet, it all looks doable. There are two 
issues that we will have:

1. Handling the current state keeping. Andrew Tridgell has suggested the 
possibility of adding a state attribute to fields in the IDL, eg:

   [... state ...] string  file_name;

This will not take much work in the parser, and can allow us to generate 
code to keep state info around.

2. Labels for bitfields and enum fields. At present there is no way in the 
IDL to specify the list of text strings associated with bit fields and 
enum fields. There are a couple of approaches, including another attribute 
like labels(foo), which causes the dissector generator to insert calls to 
routines that generate the right stuff.

I am working on the initial stuff and will probably post some results at 
some stage ...
 
Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org, 
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com