### Last updated 21 January 1997

In this directory you find all the stuff related to the "ASCII based dev api"
library : "libascapi.la". This library has been designed as a shared library
which can dynamically be loaded (using dynamic loader functions) in any C
program. It has been loaded and used inside veetest application to access
the TACO control system. It will also be used in "xdevmenu" application to
access devices.


The aim of this library is to give an ASCII based interface to the device
server API. It means one can execute a command on a device server simply by
specifying the device name and the command name with two strings. He (she)
is returned the output result and the eventual errors in the form of string
as well. If the device server command requires an input argument, it is also
specified through a string.

This library has simply one C module in which the 3 functions of the interface
will be defined (asc_dev_get, asc_dev_put, asc_dev_putget).


Organization of this directory :
           
     --> doc : contains 2 frameMaker files (spec.doc, specTOC.doc) these are
               the source files of the documentation. A FrameMaker generated
               postscript file is available (spec.ps) also.


     --> . : contains all C code files + Makefile + RCS directory

In directory, one can find an archived version of the library with the
corresponding target in the Makefile. The reason is that a shared library
cannot be debugged (see "Programming with HPUX" doc) and the only way of
debugging is to debug the archived version and then rebuild it in shared mode.
So the archived version has only be used in the debugging phase. It will not
be distributed nor supported.

The Solaris version has been tested a bit thanks to the test application, but
needs deeper tests.



     Faranguiss Poncet   2028

		README for ASCII API library of TACO 
		------------------------------------

The TACO Ascii based API library is used to give the clients a string (C type)
based interface to the device server commands.

The name of the device, the command to be executed on that device, the input
and output parameters all are specified in strings.

This library uses the TACO type conversion library to do the necessary type
conversion to (output data) and from (input data) strings.

Files needed to build the TACO conversion library are :

	asc_api.c - Contains three functions for executing a device server
                    command : dev_get_ascii, dev_put_ascii and dev_putget_ascii.

To be able to test and to debug the library a test application is developped.
It can be found under ../test_lib directory.

