I have this ASN.1 definition and this byte stream, can I use A2J?

I get about 1 email per week about this, and despite the fact that the docs are out there, for some reason people don't seem to be able to find them. So, if you have an ASN.1 definition file and need to encode/decode a byte stream from a device or some other source, here's how to do it with A2J.

1. Get A2J. There are a couple of options. you can download the source code from http://developer.k-int.com/svn/a2j/a2j_v2/trunk/ and build it yourself, or follow the other approach, and use Maven, which is the approach I'll discuss here. The a2j libraries are available from the public maven2 repositories so there's no special download or setup, just add the following to the dependencies section in your project.pom file and the jar will be downloaded from one of the maven2 repositories:

org.jzkit a2j 2.0.4

2. You need to precompile the asn.1 definition into codec classes. Use the following plugin :


maven-antrun-plugin


generate-sources

run



Running ASN.1 Compliation - output to ${project.build.directory}/generated/main/java


Precompile Z39.50

Precompile Character Set Negotiation


${project.build.directory}/generated/main/java





com.sun
tools
1.4
system
${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar





Obviously, replace input_file with your input file, and the base package with whatever java package you want to use. This will generate a load of java stubs that can process and input and output byte streams defined by the asn.1 specification. Am exanple pom can be found here: http://developer.k-int.com/svn/jzkit/jzkit3/trunk/jzkit_z3950_plugin/pom.xml

3. I want to read bytes from an input stream. Again, you can copy code from jzkit3, specifically, http://developer.k-int.com/svn/jzkit/jzkit3/trunk/jzkit_z3950_plugin/src/main/java/org/jzkit/z3950/util/ZEndpoint.java but the abbreviated version:

while(running) {
try {
log.debug("Waiting for data on input stream.....");
BERInputStream bds = new BERInputStream(incoming_data, charset_encoding,DEFAULT_BUFF_SIZE, reg);
PDU_type pdu = null;
pdu = (PDU_type)codec.serialize(bds, pdu, false, "PDU");
log.debug("Notifiy observers");

notifyAPDUEvent(pdu);

log.debug("Yield to other threads....");
yield();
}
}

incoming_data is an input stream, charset_encoding is a Character Set, reg is the OID register than can be used to identify any externals / other OID's appearing in the data.

Have fun!