2.3. Generate Type Support Code with rtiddsgen¶

You will provide your IDL as an input to rtiddsgen. rtiddsgen supports code generation for the following standard types:

  • octet, char, wchar

  • short, unsigned short

  • long, unsigned long

  • long long, unsigned long long float

  • double, long double

  • boolean

  • string

  • struct

  • array

  • enum

  • wstring

  • sequence

  • union

  • typedef

  • value type

rtiddsgen is in <your_top_level_dir>/rti_connext_dds-<version>/rti_connext_micro-<version>/bin.

To generate support code for data types in a file called HelloWorld.idl:

rtiddsgen -micro -language C -replace HelloWorld.idl

Run rtiddsgen -help to see all available options. For the options used here:

  • The -micro option is necessary to generate support code specific to Connext Micro, as rtiddsgen is also capable of generating support code for Connext, and the generated code for the two are different. Note that Connext Micro and RTI Connext Cert use the same rtiddsgen and similar code is generated. However, when the generated code is compiled with RTI_CERT certain APIs are excluded.

  • The -language option specifies the language of the generated code. Connext Micro supports C and traditional C++ (with -language C++).

  • The -replace option specifies that the new generated code will replace, or overwrite, any existing files with the same name.

rtiddsgen generates the following files for an input file HelloWorld.idl:

  • HelloWorld.h and HelloWorld.c. Operations to manage a sample of the type, and a DDS sequence of the type.

  • HelloWorldPlugin.h and HelloWorldPlugin.c. Implements the type-plugin interface defined by Connext Micro. Includes operations to serialize and deserialize a sample of the type and its DDS instance keys.

  • HelloWorldSupport.h and HelloWorldSupport.c. Operations to generate a type-specific DataWriter and DataReader, and to register the type with a DDS DomainParticipant.

Connext Micro supports generating two different types of type support:

  1. XTypes - This is the default method and generates type support for types compatible with the DDS XTypes standard.

  2. CDR - This is the original CDR support and uses less memory. To enable this method, pass the option -intepreted 0 to rtiddsgen.

For more details, see Generating Type Support with rtiddsgen.