Specifying external function with AnimSerializeOperation property

Compare with Specifying external function with AnimUnserializeOperation property.

IBM® Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody® can animate (display) the values of simple types and one-dimensional arrays without any problem. To display the current values of such attributes during an animation session, open the Features window for the instance.

However, if you want to animate a more complex type, such as a date, the type must be converted to a string (char *) forRhapsody to display it. This conversion is done by writing a global function, an instrumentation function, that takes one argument of the type you want to display, and returns a char *. You must disable animation of the instrumentation function itself (using the Animate and AnimateArguments properties for the function).

For example, you can have a type tDate, defined as follows:

typedef struct date {
   int day;
   int month;
   int year; } %s;

You can have an object with an attribute count of type int, and an attribute date of type tDate. The object can have an initializer with the following body:

me->date.month = 5;
me->date.day = 12;
me->date.year = 2000;

If you want to animate the date attribute, the AnimSerializeOperation property for date must be set to the name of a function that converts the type tDate to char *. For example, you can set the property to a function named showDate. This function name must be entered without any parentheses. It must take an attribute of type tDate and return a char *. The Animate and AnimateArguments properties for the showDate function must be set to Cleared.

The implementation of the showDate function might be as follows:

showDate(tDate aDate) {
    char* buff;
    buff = (char*) malloc(sizeof(char) * 20);
    sprintf(buff,"%d %d %d",
        aDate.month,aDate.day,aDate.year);
    return buff;
}

When you run this model with animation, instances of this object display a value of 5 12 2000 for the date attribute in the browser.

If the showDate function is defined in the same class that the attribute belongs to and the function is not static, the AnimSerializeOperation property value is like the following example:

myReal->showDate

This value shows that the function is called from the serializeAttributes function, located in the class OMAnimated<classname>.

The default for this property is an empty string.