[Css-csts] Plain-text diagnostics

[Ray, Timothy J. (GSFC-5830)]

Dear WG,

Our inter-operability testing of the Monitored-Data service has stalled.  We quickly got to the point where the User is able to bind to the Provider.  But the Start of the Cyclic Report procedure fails, and the User is unable to untangle the diagnostic information in the Start-Return.   The purpose of this email is to give you a heads-up on a problem that, in my opinion, is critical.

The problem is in the way that Framework diagnostic information is expressed.  If it were expressed as plain text, debugging would be relatively straightforward.  Instead, many diagnostics are contained within multiple levels of ASN.1 encoding (i.e. requiring the receiver of a message to make recursive calls to an ASN.1 decoder in order to extract the diagnostic info).    There is what we in America call a "catch-22": once both the User and Provider create perfectly-formed ASN.1, we'll be able to untangle the diagnostics (but we won't need to, because our operations will be successful); until then, we'll need to be able to untangle the diagnostics (but we aren't able to).

My suggestion will be to include a plain-text representation of diagnostic information in our ASN.1 message definitions.  Preferably, the plain-text would replace the current representation.

Best regards,
Tim
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