Getting Started Guide

This document will quickly get you up and running with IDM. If you haven't already, please download and install the IDM on your system.

First Look

When you first launch the IDM, you will see the Start Page. This page contains links to documentation (including this page) and other resources. It is occasionally updated with new release information.

Start Page

Getting Connected

The first thing we want do is get your data to the IDM. Open up the connection dialog via the Connection/Preferences... menu item.

Connection Dialog

The default behavior is for the IDM to listen on port 50,000 for UDP packets. When a packet arrives, the IDM treats the contents as one message to be decoded. The contents may be interpreted as binary or ASCII hex.

Notice the question mark icon on the dialog's title bar. In order to get more information on an option, you can click the question mark, then click the individiual control to see a context help popup. This option is available throughout the IDM.

Close the dialog once you have it configured.

Sending Messages

Pressing the space bar or clicking the connection tool bar button Connection Icon will start a session. This will be indicated by a time stamp appearing in the left pane, the Session window. This will cause the IDM to start listening to the port you configured above. If you press the space bar again, you will stop the session, and the IDM will stop listening.

Now its up to you to send messages to the IDM, one message per packet, as we configured above. The xmit tool comes in handy for this purpose.

Once you are sending message to the IDM, you will see them appear in the sessions.

Capture

You can clear the messages by hitting the clear message Clear Icon toolbar button.

These messages appear as ASCII Hex and there is nothing appearing in the Message View yet because we have not told the IDM how to decode them. Let's do that now.

Decoding

We tell the IDM how to decode messages by giving it an XDDL file. XDDL stands for eXtensible Data Definition Language. There is extensive documentation on XDDL, and the best place to start is the XDDL Authoring Guide.

Once you become familiar with XDDL (it's pretty simple) you can create a small XDDL file to describe your data. If your messages are defined with a message length, message type, and then message contents, you can use a file like this as a template:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
    <xddl>
     <structure>
      <field name="Length" length="8"/>
      <field name="Type" length="8"/>
      <record name="Content" length="RecordLength * 8">
        <!-- Now just fill this in -->
      </record>
     </structure>
    </xddl>

    template.xddl

Now load the file into the the IDM via the File/Load Message Definition... menu option. Whatever messages you have in the IDM will be reinterpreted with the new definition.

Now its just a matter of refining your XDDL to decode deeper into your message contents. Simply edit your file and press the reload icon Reload Icon (or press F5) to reload and reparse your messages.

Decode

And that's it! The IDM will automatically reload the last XDDL file it used each time it runs.