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Old September 1st, 2011   #2
ericthegeek
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Join Date: Aug 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eldoMS View Post
- how do I know _CLEARED is supported in the controller, or are most controllers already on that level? A controller without the support just ignores gracefully?
A responder has no way to know if the controller supports the _CLEARED messages. All you can do is send the _CLEARED response and hope the controller handles it gracefully. There's really no other option.

Quote:
Originally Posted by eldoMS View Post
- do I only report once a certain failure (when it arises)? Or consistently with each STATUS_MESSAGE when _CLEARED is not supported? And if I need to report it consistently, how often?
This has always been unclear in the standard, and the 2010 revision doesn't address it.

If you report a failure that is still occurring with every status message response, the user will be flooded with messages. But, if you only send it once, if the message gets lost for some reason, there's no way to know that it's there.

My opinion is that a responder should re-send status messages that are still occurring in proportion to how serious the error is. You might want to re-send a "Dimmer on Fire" status every 30 seconds, but "Gel String getting old" would only need to be sent once a day or so. To be clear, this is not based on the standard. It's merely my way of working around what I see as a limitation in the standard. What is really needed is a "resend all currently occurring status conditions". CLEAR_STATUS_ID *might* be able to serve this purpose, but the text isn't really very clear on exactly what CLEAR_STATUS_ID should do.

Quote:
Originally Posted by eldoMS View Post
- in the case of _CLEARED I only report ONCE that a certain condition was cleared?
Yes, I agree with this, provided you follow the rules for STATUS_GET_LAST_MESSAGE so that a controller has a way to re-request a _CLEARED message that gets lost or corrupt.

Quote:
Originally Posted by eldoMS View Post
- the PID CLEAR_STATUS_ID, what does it exactly do in this case? Is it a reset of the condition, that in a sticky example immediately comes again with a voltage or temp error and there will be another reporting of this in the next STATUS_MESSAGES (one time only?). Is this the controllers method to clear conditions and create a fresh list? How often could a controller do this? The _CLEARED method is used to remove a warning/error from the controller as soon as it is cleared instead of going via CLEAR_STATUS_ID?
I have no idea what CLEAR_STATUS_ID is supposed to do. There simply isn't enough information in the standard. One interpretation is that if you have a ton of old status message that are queued up and waiting to be delivered, this PID can flush the queue and allow you to get newer messages.

A second interpretation is that it tells the responder to forget what it has already sent, and re-deliver any status conditions that are still occurring.

As I said earlier, I prefer the second interpretation since it's a feature the standard really needs, but I don't think the text is clear enough.
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