Overview

Each night, the FSW group's document mechanization scripts generate tens of thousands of C&T (Command and Telemetry) web pages. This is an overwhelming amount of information; fortunately, several features facilitate rapid and convenient navigation:

• The pages are well supplied with inter-page links. Some packet pages also contain image-mapped diagrams, showing both external and internal relationships.

• The pages are accessible through the FSW Search Tool, a full-text searching facility.

• Several dozen index pages present subsets of the pages, in a variety of sort orders.

The following sections describe some of these facilities in more detail.

View Options

The View Options menu, found on most C&T web pages, allows the user to select between two pairs of inter-related "views" (Maintenance/Operation and Abstract/Concrete). The current selection is emboldened.

• Maintenance/Operation Focus

  This choice sets the focus to (FSW) Maintenance or (LAT) Operation:

  • Maintenance mode is aimed at the needs of software engineers. It shows data structures (e.g., arrays, bitfields, and sttructs) in great detail, including C code, etc. By and large, items are named and described in LCAT terms.

  • Operation mode is aimed at the needs of LAT operators. It hides data structures and much of the details of Packets and Fields. By and large, items are named and described in ITOS terms.

• Abstract/Concrete Data Structures

  This choice is only relevant to the Maintenance focus (the Operation focus is only available in Concrete form). It controls whether data structures are shown in Abstract or Concrete form. That is, whether there is a page for each instance of each data structure or just a page containing the abstract description of each data structure.

  This affects the information that can be displayed. For example, only the Concrete variants can show offsets, ITOS names for Fields, etc.

Indexes

Each index page contains a pair of menus which lets the user select any other applicable index. The current selection is emboldened; inapplicable selections are greyed out.

• "Index by:"

  Each link in this menu allows the user to jump directly to a specific index (e.g., "Telecommand Packet Index, by APID"). Within the menu, each row (e.g., Command, Telemetry) contains links to indexes for items (e.g., APID, alg, pkt) related to that type of packet.

• "Index (within Package) by:"

  This menu is identical, save that the indexes (e.g., "Telecommand Packet Index, by APID within Package") are divided into sections by the relevant FSW Package.

Name spaces

Each menu row, above, is divided into three regions. The ITOS and LCAT regions contain links to indexes whose keys are taken from the ITOS or LCAT name space, respectively. Thus, if you click on "ITOS/pkt", you should expect to see ITOS packet names in the first column of the resulting index.

The first region in each row (e.g., APID, alg, rng) contains items which have no distinct name space. APIDs are numbers, not names; attributes (e.g., alg) have the same names for both ITOS and LCAT.

Index layout

The first column in each index page contains the "sort key" for the index. (Command APID pages are further sorted by "FC", the function code field.) The Description column, at the end of each line, contains descriptions of the items (e.g., packets, fields) specified by the sort key.

The column headings for names and descriptions indicate the applicable name space: (I) for ITOS, (L) for LCAT. If no specific description is available for an ITOS field name, the (more general) LCAT description is substituted, preceded by the hint "(L)". (LCAT descriptions apply to the general definition of the field, not to any specific instance.)

Other columns are provided, in addition to the sort key and description, to provide context. For example, the Offset column might give the offset (within the packet) for a field or bitfield.

The names of these contextual items (and the descriptions on APID index pages) defer to the prevailing Maintenance/Operation choice. That is, the ITOS (LCAT) name space is the default in Operation (Maintence) focus.