1. About System Designer

Writing your application XML code can be quite challenging. Using a good editor with autocomplete capabilities, along with RTI’s XSD Schema can help. It can still be complicated, however, especially as the project gets bigger and involves multiple files.

RTI System Designer is a tool that allows you to graphically design and configure all aspects of a Connext distributed system. Use it to simplify building XML configuration files for your DDS system and better manage the complexity of a large system.

1.1. System Designer Infrastructure

System Designer is based on the following RTI technologies:

RTI Connext Core Libraries XML-Based Application Creation, a mechanism to simplify the development of Connext applications
RTI Routing Service, an out-of-the-box solution used to rapidly scale and integrate real-time systems that are disparate or geographically dispersed

Think of System Designer as a user interface for:

XML-Based Application Creation, which enables you to specify the following DDS system elements in XML format:
- The data types used to communicate information within the system
- The Topics used in the domain, associating each Topic with a data type
- The DomainParticipants that could potentially be used, giving each a unique name
- The DataWriters and DataReaders within each DomainParticipant, each associated with its corresponding Topic
- The Quality of Service (QoS) for all DDS Entities
Routing Service, which enables you to specify the following Routing Service elements in XML format:
- The data types that can be used by Routing Service
- The Quality of Service (QoS) for all DDS Entities used by Routing Service
- A library of Routing Service plugins
- The Routing Service configuration

The only application code you need to write will indicate the name of the DomainParticipant to be created. System Designer’s XML-Based Application Creation infrastructure takes care of the rest by creating the DomainParticipant, registering the types and Topics, and populating all the configured Entities. In addition, you can configure an execution of Routing Service.

1.2. System Designer Interface

The System Designer interface includes the following areas:

Toolbar. Manage projects, files, XML object comments, and Connext AI options.
View menu. Click the hamburger icon to select a view. Each view represents an XML element that is configurable in System Designer. Types is the default view.
Tree panel. A hierarchical list of all elements in the selected view.
Information panel. Displays information and available subviews for the element selected in the tree panel.
Chat panel (experimental). In-app guidance on using System Designer, DDS, and the Connext platform.

1.3. Connext AI (Experimental)

Connext AI is RTI’s cloud-based solution designed to integrate artificial intelligence with Connext tools. This platform has been integrated in this System Designer release to automate or augment common tasks and provide guidance as you build your system. Using natural language, Connext AI can help define data models, set QoS, implement prototype code, and debug/troubleshoot your system architecture. You can also use it to become familiar with System Designer and DDS terminology and usage.

In this release, you can evaluate this new feature by using it to:

Generate pre-configured projects using natural language descriptions
Learn about DDS and the Connext product suite using the integrated chat feature
Get information and suggestions about individual elements of your XML architecture

Note

Connext AI is an experimental feature included in this release for evaluation only. Use it to explore the new AI features supported in System Designer.

Carefully review and test AI-generated suggestions before deploying in production.

1.4. How to Read this Documentation

This Getting Started Guide is not a complete manual for System Designer, and it does not cover all the functionality. The tool includes inline help; look for the symbol for more information about the user interface controls.

This guide includes three main sections:

Using System Designer details how to use the graphical interface to build XML configuration files.
Tutorials steps through three scenarios to demonstrate how to build a complete XML file for an application.
Release Notes lists supported platforms, what’s new, what’s fixed, and known issues in the current release.

1.5. Before You Begin

This document assumes you have a basic understanding of RTI Connext application development and concepts, such as DDS domains, DomainParticipants, Topics, DataWriters, and DataReaders. For an overview of these concepts, see the RTI Connext Getting Started Guide.