OSI/MHS Management Programming Manual
OSI/MHS Management Programming Manual—424824-001
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SPI Programming Considerations for 
OSI/MHS
Once your subsystem and EMS processes are running and your management application 
has established communication with them, the main business of your management 
application is to format and send commands, decode responses and act on the results, 
and interpret event messages and act on their information.
The SPI Common Extensions Manual provides general instructions for formatting 
commands, and decoding responses and event messages, for subsystems such as 
OSI/MHS. This section provides some summary information and discusses SPI 
programming considerations that are specific to the OSI/MHS subsystem. Topics 
included are:
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Definition files
•
Templates and labels
•
Naming guidelines for applications
•
Message elements for the OSI/MHS subsystem
•
Using SPI to build commands and decode responses
•
Retrieving and decoding event messages
Definition Files
The commands, responses, and event messages sent to and received from the OSI/MHS 
subsystem are made up of items called tokens. Each token contains a particular piece of 
information, such as a command parameter or an item of information about an event. 
Tokens can be single values or structures consisting of several values.  Some tokens, 
called header tokens, are present in every command and response, and/or in every event 
message.
Tokens and related data items for commands, responses, and event messages must be 
declared in your management applications, and Compaq provides these declarations for 
you in definition files.  A set of definition files is provided as part of each Compaq 
subsystem that supports DSM, and a few other Compaq software components (such as 
SPI and EMS) also provide definition files. Each such software component includes 
definition files for the TAL, COBOL85, C, TACL, and DDL languages.
To be able to use the data declarations defined by a particular Compaq software 
component, your application must incorporate the appropriate programming-language 
definition file associated with that software component. The declarations in a 
COBOL85 definition file are grouped into sections to enable COBOL85 programs to 
declare multiple copies of structures in the definition file.  TAL and C programs can 
source in either the entire definition file or just the sections they need. The TACL 










