Structured Data Types in External Functions

When using structured data types, it is important to pay attention to the alignment and size of structure elements. The table below shows the size of all conventional data types that can be used within function declarations in Silk Performer scripts.

Simple data types allowed as input and output parameters are:

Table 1. Conventional data type sizes
Data Type	Size
Char, unsigned char	1
Short, unsigned short	2
Long	4
Double	8
Float	4
Char[x]	x

C Source Code

The example below clarifies structure composition by showing a data structure that contains all the simple data types.

// declare a demo data structure
#pragma pack(1) // alignment to 1-byte boundaries
typedef struct {
  char           myChar;       // size: 1 byte pos: 1
  short          myShort;      // size: 2 bytes pos: 2
  long           myLong;       // size: 4 bytes pos: 4
  double         myDouble;     // size: 8 bytes pos: 8
  float          myFloat;      // size: 4 bytes pos: 16
  unsigned short myUShort;     // size: 2 bytes pos: 20
  char           myString[10]; // size: 10 bytes pos: 22
  unsigned char  myUChar;      // size: 1 byte pos: 32
} TESTSTRUCT;
#pragma pack()

 char* T_STRUCT(TESTSTRUCT * s)
{
  char sBuf[10000];
  // manipulate values of data structure and generate a
  // return value for demonstration purpose
  ...
  return sBuf;
}

BDL External Function Declarations

To handle structured data types, BDL uses strings of appropriate length and number of type-dependent Get and Set functions. For each structured data type passed to a function, an inout string parameter must be defined. These strings must be exactly as long as the data structures defined in the DLLs.

The first position in a BDL string that can hold a structured data type is one (1). When variables are aligned to one-byte boundaries, the starting position of the next element is derived by adding the current position to the size of the current element. For the data structure declared in the example above, a 32-byte string is required.

"T_STRUCT"
  function t_struct(inout string(32)): string(1000);

BDL External Function Calls

In the following example, arbitrary values are assigned to all the elements of the data structure using the corresponding Set functions. Next, the external function t_struct is called to manipulate the data structure.

dcltrans
  transaction TMain
  var
    n1, n2, n3, n4, n5  : number;
    n6, n7, n8, n9, n10 : number;
    f1, f2, f3, f4      : float;
    sStruct             : string(100);
    sRet                : string(1000);
  begin
    /* one-byte alignment */
    SetChar (sStruct, 1, 127);
    SetShort (sStruct, 2, 32000);
    SetLong (sStruct, 4, 2000000);
    SetDouble(sStruct, 8, 12345.12345);
    SetFloat (sStruct, 16, 12.99);
    SetUShort(sStruct, 20, 64000);
    SetString(sStruct, 22, "123456789", 10);
    SetUChar (sStruct, 32, 255);
    sRet := t_struct(sStruct);
  end TMain;