description.txt

BCAM 1394 Driver

/*!
\mainpage BCAM Topolgy Viewer Application Program

\section sect_1 Introduction

The BCAM Topology Viewer Application is a tool for displaying the topology of all IEEE 1394 devices connected to your PC. 
This tool is very useful for finding a break in the connections between the devices. Imagine that you have
several cameras connected via several hubs and that one camera does not appear in the device list of the Topology Viewer. 
The Viewer shows you all properly connected devices, including adapters and hubs, and you can trace the connections
until you find the first device not connected. You can now limit your checking of cable connections, power supply,
and functionality to this device. In addition, the BCAM Topology Viewer reports free and occcupied isochronous channels
and bandwidth. Note that several restrictions apply when using IEEE 1394. These restrictions are discussed
in detail in our application note called "Connecting multiple Cameras to One PC".



\section sect_2 Usage

Start the BCAM Topology Viewer. The Topology Viewer will display some buttons and a control showing the connected devices.
The heart of  the BCAM Topology Viewer is the control. It is a tree control which displays a tree view of connected devices
for each IEEE 1394 adapter in your PC. Each device is represented as a node with its logo and its name. You can get further
device information for each node via the context menu. For Basler cameras, a model name, serial number, unique id,
number of ports and a physical ID are available. For hubs and adapters, only the number of ports and the physical ID are
available. In addition, you can get information about the free and occupied resources on the associated adapter via the
context menu of a root node. Note that a root node does not necessarily coincide with an adapter.  The device information
and the topology may help you to identify the adapter and the devices. You can switch on a detailed view which lets the
control show the physical ID's and the connected and unconnected ports. There is a button available to issue a bus reset.
After a bus reset has occured, the topology view may change because a different device may become the root node. There is a
second button available to force an update of the topology view. If you use this button, there should be no changes in the
topology view. You can use it when you suspect that the BCAM Topology Viewer may not have noticed a newly connected device.

You can also use the BCAM Topology Viewer application as a sample program showing how to integrate the BCAMTopologyView
control into your own application. See the section of this on-line documentation called <em>Using the Topology View Control
in Your Project</em> for details. This section describes how to integrate the BCAM Topology View control into a Visual
Studio C++ WTL project, a Visual Studio C++ MFC project, or a into a Visual Basic project.
   

\section sect_3 Implementation

The BCAM Topology Viewer is a dialog based WTL/ATL application wrapping the BCAMTopologyViewCtl which retrieves
information about the connected devices. The maindlg class and the dialog resource of the BCAM Topology Viewer hold the
specific implementation of the BCAM Topology Viewer, the rest is generated by the WTL wizard. In maindlg.h, each step to
elaborate the wizard generated code to the BCAM Topology Viewer is marked with a comment such as // step x do y. Also see
the section of this on-line documentation called <em>Using the Topology View Control in Your Project</em> for a detailed
description how to integrate the control into your application.

The BCAMTopologyViewCtl is implemented as an ATL control inside the BCAMTopologyView.dll. It is an ActiveX control and
can be integrated as any other ActiveX control. The control uses the bus access driver via the BcamApi to scan all IEEE 
1394 devices and to retrieve device and resource information. The class CBcamTopologyViewCtl holds the implementation of
the control.  The CBcamTopologyViewCtl is a TreeViewCtl showing the available IEEE 1394 ports. Each node of the control
corresponds to an IEEE 1394 device. The interface IBcamTopologyViewCtl allows you to force a rescan of the devices, to
issue a bus reset, and to switch on/off display of details. The CBcamTopologyViewCtl has the necessary message handlers
to generate the node context menu, to react on chages of the selected node, and to draw the nodes with special background
colors. The selected node is shown with a dark blue background and its ports are shown with a light blue background.

The class CPropertiesDlg holds the implementation of the modal dialog which shows the device properties. 

The class CResourcesDlg holds the implementation of the modal dialog which shows the occupied and free resources.
 
*/