1. Introduction

Note

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

RTI System Designer is based on RTI XML-Based Application Creation - a mechanism to simplify the development of Connext DDS applications. For an overview of its functionality, please see the RTI Connext DDS Core Libraries XML-Based Application Creation Getting Started Guide.

System Designer is a tool that allows you to graphically design and configure all the aspects of a Connext DDS distributed system. Think of it as a user interface (UI) to XML-Based Application Creation, a technology that allows you to specify in XML format all the aspects of a DDS system:

  • The Data Types that will be used to communicate information in the system
  • The Topics that will be used in the domain, associating each Topic with a Data Type
  • The DomainParticipant that can potentially be used, giving each a participant-name
  • The DataWriters and DataReaders within each DomainParticipant, each associated with its corresponding Topic
  • The Qualities of Service (QoS) that all the entities can use

Your application code simply indicates the participant configuration name of the DomainParticipant that it wants to create. The XML-Based Application Creation infrastructure takes care of the rest: creating the DomainParticipant, registering the types and Topics, and populating all the configured Entities.

Writing this XML can be quite challenging. Using a good editor with autocomplete capabilities along with the provided XML Schema can be of great help. But it is still quite complicated, especially as the project gets bigger and involves multiple files. The System Designer UI tool can help ease this process and manage the complexity of a large system.

This Getting Started Guide is not a manual for System Designer and it does not cover all the functionality. The tool has a lot of inline help. Look for the help_icon symbol for more help while using the tool.