Using your own QoS profile in RTI Admin Console

RTI Admin Console uses several non-default QoS settings when interacting with Topics that are used to communicate with other RTI products. The out-of-the-box settings attempt to satisfy the majority of use cases customers have with other configurations, but sometimes it is necessary to change these QoS settings. Common use cases for adding a custom QoS profile include disabling multicast support or using a non-default transport such as TCP.

Admin Console also makes use of some less-frequently-used QoS settings (such as ignore_default_domain_announcements) in order to implement certain features.

As a result, simply replacing the QoS settings that ship with Admin Console can lead to unexpected behavior such as auto-join or remote administration not working. This article walks you through using your own QoS settings while preserving the functionality of Admin Console.

Let's start by reviewing the different use cases of custom QoS profiles. There are two possible ways we can use a custom QoS profile in Admin Console:

• Administration: this scenario represents the main view used to join domains, perform discovery, and administer RTI products (such as RTI Routing Service).
• Data Visualization: this scenario is only present when subscribing to Topics and displaying data.

In order to correctly use your custom QoS profile in Admin Console, we may need to modify it a bit depending on the goal.

The first step is to open the RTI_ADMIN_CONSOLE_EXAMPLE_PROFILE.xml file that is located in the installation directory ($NDDSHOME/resource/xml/).

NOTE: Prior to 6.1: The file is called admin_console_example_profiles.xml

This file contains three profiles with all the configuration settings used by Admin Console. From this file, copy ExampleAdminConsole::BaseProfile and ExampleAdminConsole::Default profiles to your custom XML file. Be sure to put the profiles ahead of other profiles in your file since we’ll be referencing them. Copy only the profiles themselves and not the ExampleAdminConsole library. Even though the RTI_ADMIN_CONSOLE_EXAMPLE_PROFILE.xml file is not used by Admin Console itself, it is not recommended to modify it since there is no other way of recovering it apart from reinstalling Connext DDS

NOTE: Prior to 6.1: you should copy the ExampleAdministration profile (instead of BaseProfile and Default) and do the same following steps as if it were the Default profile. 

<qos_library name="MyLibrary">
        <!-- Insert BaseProfile and Default above your profile -->
        <qos_profile name="BaseProfile">
             ...
        </qos_profile>

        <qos_profile name="Default" 
                base_name="MyLibrary::BaseProfile">
              ...
        </qos_profile> 

        <qos_profile name="MyProfile">
             ...
        </qos_profile>
</qos_library> 

Next, make your custom profile inherit from the Default profile. There are two possible scenarios depending on your profile:

Your profile does NOT inherit from any other profile:

In this case you would only add the base_name="MyLibrary::Default" to your profile.

<qos_library name="MyLibrary">         <!-- Insert BaseProfile and Default above your profile -->         <qos_profile name="BaseProfile">              ...         </qos_profile>         <qos_profile name="Default"                  base_name="MyLibrary::BaseProfile">              ...         </qos_profile>          <qos_profile name="MyProfile"                 base_name="MyLibrary::Default">              ...         </qos_profile> </qos_library>

This is how your profiles should look like:

Your profile DOES inherit from another profile:

Adding the custom profile to Admin Console

<qos_profile name="ExampleDataVisualization">
  <participant_qos base_name="MyLibrary::ExampleAdministration"> 
    ...
  </participant_qos>
    ...  
</qos_profile>