Safeguard Management Programming Manual (G06.29+, H06.08+, J06.03+)

Glossary
Safeguard Management Programming Manual—422086-028
Glossary-8
header token
header token. A special kind of token that provides information pertaining to the SPI
message as a whole. The header tokens are typically items common to all or most
messages of a specific kind. Header tokens differ from other tokens in several ways:
they exist in the buffer at initialization, and their values are usually set by SSINIT; they
can occur only once in a buffer; they are never enclosed in a list; they cannot be
moved to another buffer with SSMOVE; and programs cannot position to them or
retrieve their values using the NEXTCODE or NEXTTOKEN operation. Programs
retrieve the values of header tokens by passing appropriate token codes to SSGET
and can change the values of some header tokens by passing their token codes to
SSPUT. Examples of header tokens for commands are the command, the object type,
the maximum-response token, the server-version token, the maximum-field-version
token, and the checksum token. Examples of header tokens for event messages are
the event number, the event generation time, the logging time, the maximum-field-
version token, and the checksum token.
header type. A header token in an SPI message that indicates whether the message is: 1)
a command or response message, or 2) an event message.
high-level command. A command that results in multiple commands to one or more
subsystems. You could write such a command (in TAL, COBOL, C, or TACL) as part of
a management application.
high-level procedure. A procedure that provides a high-level interface to a lower-level
facility—for instance, a procedure that lets an application issue a command in a single
call rather than in multiple SPI procedure calls and a call to the file system. HP
provides a set of high-level procedures as part of EMS to aid programmers in building
event messages and retrieving information from them.
information command. A command that retrieves information about an object but does not
act on the object or change it in any way. See also action command.
information token. A response token that conveys information requested by a command,
as opposed to one that serves a syntactical purpose such as delimiting a list, one that
indicates response continuation, one that identifies how a command completed, or one
that identifies an error. Object-selector tokens, attribute tokens, status tokens, and
statistics tokens are kinds of information tokens.
initial position. The location in an SPI buffer just prior to the first token that is not a header
token. See also current position and next position.
initialize. To prepare a data structure to have values assigned to it. For example, the SPI
SSINIT procedure initializes the buffer by building the message header. The SSNULL
procedure initializes an extensible structured token by assigning null values to the
fields of the structure.
is-present field. A field in a structure that indicates whether the value in another field was
supplied by the program that built the structure. In most cases, a field to which the
program made no assignment has the null value that was set by SSNULL. A