Content Filtered Topic

Concept

A Content Filtered Topic is a Topic with filtering properties. It makes it possible to subscribe to topics and at the same time specify that you are only interested in a subset of the Topic's data. For example, suppose you have a Topic that contains a temperature reading for a boiler, but you are only interested in temperatures outside the normal operating range. A Content Filtered Topic can be used to limit the number of data samples a DataReader has to process and may also reduce the amount of data sent over the network.

A Content Filtered Topic creates a relationship between a Topic, also called the related topic, and user-specified filtering properties. The filtering properties consist of an expression and a set of parameters.

• The filter expression evaluates a logical expression on the Topic content. The filter expression is similar to the WHERE clause in a SQL expression.
• The parameters are strings that give values to the 'parameters' in the filter expression. There must be one parameter string for each parameter in the filter expression.

Example Description

In this example, the publisher application reliably transmits 0, 1, 2, ... 9 and repeats. The last twenty samples are saved for late joiners.

After this topic is created, a Content Filtered Topic is created based on the normal topic. In this case, the filter expression is parameterized:(x >= %0 and x <= %1), but it could be a static string as well, such as x = 3. The filter parameters, represented by %k (where k = 0 to 99), are passed in as a DDS_StringSeq when the content filtered topic is created.

These parameters can be changed at runtime via set_expression_parameters(). In the example we the expression parameters to three different values.

• When the application starts, the expression parameters are set to %0=1 and %1=4 (i.e., we will only receive samples where 1 <= x <= 4).
• After 10 seconds, we change the parameters to %0=5 and %1=9 (i.e., we will only receive samples where 5 <= x <= 9).

Finally, after 30 seconds, we change set %0=3 and %1=9 (i.e., we will only receive samples where 3 <= x <= 9). The first time, the sequence is modified directly.

The second change shows how to get the current parameters, and creates a new sequence.

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