Instrument Interfaces in Ensemble

[Adam]

I am starting down the road of creating a interface for a laboratory
instrument. It is a ASTM standard interface that will need to be bi
directional. I have created an uni directional interface to this
instrument, however I am having a mental block on how to correctly
make it bi directional. Has anyone successfully done this that could
provide me with some pointers or a sample project, even an over view
of how this should work would be great.

[Luca]

Adam:

in order to keep the Ensemble logical separation of Input (BS) and
output (BO)
you will find that even with the bi-directional ASTM protocol you have
a BS offered as the typical TCP service
and a BO.
This BO is somewhat special though.
If you go and check out its settings you will find that there is a
property called "Partern Service" where you would specify the BS that
has the Open socket for the communication.
In other words, this BO works as a proxy if you like. You would be co-
coordinating & orchestrating your business logic in the Ensemble
production as expected and when you need to write something back
you would use this BO, which in turn would utilize the BS connectivity
to dialogue with the external source.
The BO simply queues messages to the BS.

Please see the documentation there a couple of interesting examples
for testing this.

HIH