What are "Included Services" in a Service useful for? - service

I have a custom profile for a proprietary device (my smartphone app will be the only thing communicating with my peripheral) that includes two simple services. Each service allows the client to read and write a single byte of data on the peripheral. I would like to add the ability to read and write both bytes in a single transaction.
I tried adding a third service that simply included the two existing single byte services but all that appears to do is assign a UUID that combines the UUIDs for the existing services and I don't see how to use the combined UUID since it doesn't have any Characteristic Values.
The alternatives I'm considering are to make a separate service for the two bytes and combine their effects on my server, or I could replace all of this with a single service that includes the two bytes along with a boolean flag for each byte that indicates whether or not the associated byte should be written.
The first alternative seems overly complicated and the second would preclude individual control of notifications and indications for the separate bytes.
Is there a way to use included services to accomplish my goals?

It's quite an old question, but in case anyone else comes across it I leave a comment here.
Here are two parts. One is a late answer for Lance F: You had a wrong understanding of the BLE design principles. Services are defined on the host level of the BLE stack. And you considered your problem from the application level point view, wanting an atomic transaction to provide you with a compound object of two distinct entities. Otherwise why would you have defined two services?
The second part is an answer to the actual question taken as quote from "Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy" by Kevin Townsend et al., O'Reilly, 2014, p.58:
Included services can help avoid duplicating data in a GATT server. If a service will be referenced by other services, you can use this mechanism to save memory and simplify the layout of the GATT server. In the previous analogy with classes and objects, you could see include definitions as pointers or references to an existing object instance.
It's an update of my answer to clarify why there is no need for the included services in a problem stated by Lance F.
I am mostly familiar with BLE use in medical devices, so I briefly sketch the SIG defined Glucose Profile as an example to draw some analogies with your problem.
Let's imagine a server device which has the Glucose Service with 2 defined characteristics: Glucose Measurement and Glucose Measurement Context. A client can subscribe for notifications of either or both of these characteristics. In some time later the client device can change its subscriptions by simply writing to the Client Configuration Characteristic Descriptor of the corresponding characteristic.
Server also has a special mandatory characteristic - Record Access Control Point (RACP), which is used by a client to retrieve or update glucose measurement history.
If a client wants to get a number of stored history records it writes to the RACP { OpCode: 4 (Report number of stored records), Operator: 1 (All records) }. Then a server sends an indication from the RACP { OpCode: 5 (Number of stored records response), Operator: 0 (Null), Operand: 17 (some number) }.
If a client wants to get any specific records it writes to the RACP { OpCode: 1 (Report stored records), Operator: 4 (Within range of, inclusive), Operand: [13, 14] (for example the records 13 and 14) }. In response a server sends requested records one by one as notifications of the Glucose Measurement and Glucose Measurement Context characteristics, and then sends an indication from the RACP characteristic to report a status of the operation.
So Glucose Measurement and Glucose Measurement Context are your Mode and Rate characteristics, then you also need one more control characteristic - an analog of the RACP. Now you need to define a number of codes, operators, and operands. Create a structure whichever suits you best, for example, Code: 1 - update, Operator: 1 - Mode only, Operand: actual number. A client writes it to the control point characteristic. A server gets notified on write, interprets it, and acts in a way defined by your custom profile.

Related

Is this the valid contact header and can you explain the parameters

I am new to sipp and network concepts i got a contact header
"Fin Tax" <sip:b2fdfc58-b7f2-a482-572c-8dbc1aae24#10.195.1.41:5060>;+
"ip.instance="urn:uuid:00000000-0000-0000-0000-34db8dc64>";+
u.sip!devicename="ATA34DBFD8DC64"4DBFD18DC64";+u.sip!model.cc.co.com="681"
Can you explain this contact paramerter i know the first part uri but what are next parameters
First parameter is +sip.instance (the double quote after + in the example above is a typo for sure), which is defined by IETF, it can be found in SIP Outbound (RFC5626) and GRUU (RFC5627):
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5626
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5627
Its purpose is to identify uniquely a device, independent of contact address (which can change in case of roaming around wifi hotspots or 4G/5G networks) or multiple connections, but contact addresses can also overlap when devices are located in private networks using same IP range.
Usually its value is build using a UUID (universally unique identifier), which should reduce the risk of duplicate values for users with multiple devices. Its uniqueness allows SIP Registrar Server to identify what contact record to update or remove when processing REGISTER requests from the same device.
The next two parameters prefixed with +u.sip! seem to be custom parameters set by the sending SIP UA. They look like specific to some CISCO equipment, probably a gateway. In general, SIP specifications tell that custom parameters can be ignored by receiving UA, if it does not know how to interpret them.

will the list ensure the order while the data is served from service to app?

Building an pagination API. Assume the request is coming for 0 to 5 resources.
The API returns the 5 resources in an order.
But there is no explicit sequence number or order in the responses.
When the data is transferred in a network, will the list ensures the order while the data is served from service to app?
My worries are Service will be in some technology stack - java/node-js etc., The client can be java based android app, js based react native app, another backend service in java/node-js.
Each one will have own serialization and deserialization libraries. Will it be consistent in order the elements.
I am thinking of adding explicit sequence number/index values, explicitly tell the clients to use sequence number/index values for any ordering/sorting based operations.
Is my understanding correct?
Does explicit sequence number needed or not?
Does the serialization and de-serialization library maintains the order?
to be sure to get the order you want, you could achieve it in one line if sort text object:
arrayResults.sort((a, b)=> b.titleObject.toUpperCase().localeCompare(a.titleObject.toUpperCase()))
sort number:
arrayResults.sort((a, b)=> b.numberObject - a.numberObject)
Then you could paginate peacefully

Fiware-Orion: Geolocation

Hi I'm a student and I'm working for the first time on the broker. I understood how the creation of entities works and their updating through "update" queries. My question is: you can create an entity that contains variables (eg geolocation) defined with value "null" or "zero" and then initialize them with values that interest me. So as to have dynamic and non-static variables (ie that require user update)?
Or do we need interaction with the CEP to do this?
From what I have read in the fiware-orion guide when I create an entity (ex car having attributes and velocity coordinates: geopoint). The values of these 2 attributes must be set in a static way (ex: speed 100 and position coordinates 40.257, 2.187). If I understand the values of these attributes I can only update them by making an update query. So my question is:
Is it possible to update the value of the attributes that contain the position or the speed of the car in a dynamic way, ie without having to write the values from the keyboard? Or does this require the use of the CEP of orion?
If I could not explain myself more generally I would like to know if it is possible to follow the progress of a moving car without me having to add the values from the keyboard.
Thanks.
Orion Context Brokker exposes a REST-based API that (among other things) allows you to create, update and query entities. From the point of view of Orion, it doesn't matter who is the one invoking the API: it can be done manually (for instance, using Postman or curl) or can be an automated system developed by you or a third party (for instance, a software running in a sensor in the car that measures the speed and periodically sends an update using a wireless communication network).
From a client-server point of view (in the case you are familiar with these concepts), Orion takes the server of the API role and the one updating the speed (either manually or automatically) takes the role of client of the API.

How to keep state consistent across distributed systems

When building distributed systems, it must be ensured the client and the server eventually ends up with consistent view of the data they are operating on, i.e they never get out of sync. Extra care is needed, because network can not be considered reliable. In other words, in the case of network failure, client never knows if the operation was successful, and may decide to retry the call.
Consider a microservice, which exposes simple CRUD API, and unbounded set of clients, maintained in-house by the same team, by different teams and by different companies also.
In the example, client request a creation of new entity, which the microservice successfully creates and persists, but the network fails and client connection times out. The client will most probably retry, unknowingly persisting the same entity second time. Here is one possible solution to this I came up with:
Use client-generated identifier to prevent duplicate post
This could mean the primary key as it is, the half of the client and server -generated composite key, or the token issued by the service. A service would either persist the entity, or reply with OK message in the case the entity with that identifier is already present.
But there is more to this: What if the client gives up after network failure (but entity got persisted), mutates it's internal view of the entity, and later decides to persist it in the service with the same id. At this point and generally, would it be reasonable for the service just silently:
Update the existing entity with the state that client posted
Or should the service answer with some more specific status code about what happened? The point is, developer of the service couldn't really influence the client design solutions.
So, what are some sensible practices to keep the state consistent across distributed systems and avoid most common pitfalls in the case of network and system failure?
There are some things that you can do to minimize the impact of the client-server out-of-sync situation.
The first measure that you can take is to let the client generate the entity IDs, for example by using GUIDs. This prevents the server to generate a new entity every time the client retries a CreateEntityCommand.
In addition, you can make the command handing idempotent. This means that if the server receives a second CreateEntityCommand, it just silently ignores it (i.e. it does not throw an exception). This depends on every use case; some commands cannot be made idempotent (like updateEntity).
Another thing that you can do is to de-duplicate commands. This means that every command that you send to a server must be tagged with an unique ID. This can also be a GUID. When the server receives a command with an ID that it already had processed then it ignores it and gives a positive response (i.e. 200), maybe including some meta-information about the fact that the command was already processed. The command de-duplication can be placed on top of the stack, as a separate layer, independent of the domain (i.e. in front of the Application layer).

Is a REST resource allowed to change over time?

I want to implement a REST API (for a video game on this example), and want to make it as stateless as possible (authentication would be the only state).
I am still quite confuse about what stateless truly means: for instance, 2 consecutive calls to
api.myhost.com/users/{playerid}
can provide 2 different answers in time, for instance:
{name: "toto", life: 98, score: 52}
and
{name: "toto", life: 12, score: 378}
Questions:
Is providing a different answer when accessing the same resource considered breaking the stateless condition of REST API?
Is bending the rule in that case (influence of time on a resource) considered an accepted practice?
If not, as the reality I want to represent has a state (changing over time), how am I supposed to translate it into a stateless model ?
What you describe - an API returning a different value over time - is perfectly fine. It's not what "stateless" is referring to.
"Stateless" means that each REST call should be self-contained: the server doesn't store any (or, much) information about the client. The client's state - for example, what page of a search result they were on, or whether they are logged in - isn't stored on the server; the client has to re-send it every time it makes a new request.
Here is a much more in-depth answer to a related question.
REST is stateless
REST stands for Representational State Transfer and this architecture was defined by Roy Thomas Fielding in the chapter 5 of his dissertation.
Fielding defined a set of constraints for the REST architecture. One of these constraints is the stateless communication between client and server, defined as following (the highlights are not present in his dissertation):
5.1.3 Stateless
[...] each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client. [...]
So, if you keep the session state on the server, you break the stateless constraint. Hence, it's not REST. In REST you won't have a session on the server and, consequently, you won't have session identifiers.
Each request must contain all data to be processed
Each request from client to server must contain all of the necessary information to be understood by the server. With it, you are not depending on any session context stored on the server.
When accessing protected resources that require authentication, for example, each request must contain all necessary data to be properly authenticated/authorized. It means the authentication will be performed for each request.
Resources can be static or can change over time
According to Fielding, resources can be static or they can change over time. Have a look at his dissertation:
5.2.1.1 Resources and Resource Identifiers
The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. "today's weather in Los Angeles"), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. In other words, any concept that might be the target of an author's hypertext reference must fit within the definition of a resource. A resource is a conceptual mapping to a set of entities, not the entity that corresponds to the mapping at any particular point in time.
More precisely, a resource R is a temporally varying membership function MR(t), which for time t maps to a set of entities, or values, which are equivalent. The values in the set may be resource representations and/or resource identifiers. A resource can map to the empty set, which allows references to be made to a concept before any realization of that concept exists -- a notion that was foreign to most hypertext systems prior to the Web. Some resources are static in the sense that, when examined at any time after their creation, they always correspond to the same value set. Others have a high degree of variance in their value over time. The only thing that is required to be static for a resource is the semantics of the mapping, since the semantics is what distinguishes one resource from another.
For example, the "authors' preferred version" of an academic paper is a mapping whose value changes over time, whereas a mapping to "the paper published in the proceedings of conference X" is static. These are two distinct resources, even if they both map to the same value at some point in time. The distinction is necessary so that both resources can be identified and referenced independently. A similar example from software engineering is the separate identification of a version-controlled source code file when referring to the "latest revision", "revision number 1.2.7", or "revision included with the Orange release." [...]