Chains and Blocks

The image below shows an example of the RAS Adapter interface showing two chains, “WP-S1” and “WP-S2.”

RAS Adapter with two chains

A chain is an ordered set of processing blocks designed to work with a specific RAS. A processing block is the entity that manipulates data. There are four types of blocks:

• Input Connector

• Parser

• Processor

• Output Connector

(Blocks are described in more detail in Blocks Diversity.) The process is as follows: the Input Connector connects to the RAS and gets a stream of data, then the Parser parses the stream and outputs key/value pairs. Next, these pairs are processed by Processors, and are finally sent by the Output Connector.

Each block type has its own icon. As you can see in the figure above, the “File” block of the WP-S1 chain and the “TCP Server” block of the WP-S2 chain have the same icon, meaning they are input connectors. The icons are shown below:

The WP-S1 chain reads files produced by the RAS, parses it with the separator parser, processes it with mapping and time-span processors, and outputs though HTTP to the Media Proxy.

The WP-S2 chain creates the TCP Server and waits for a connection to the RAS. After establishing a connection it parses data with the regular expressions parser, processes it with mapping, drop, replace, trim and accent processors, and outputs though HTTP to the Media Proxy.

Each chain can have multiple processor blocks, but single blocks of other types. Thus, it processes messages only from one specific RAS. If you need to support more than one RAS, just create more chains.

At the bottom of the chains area in the UI there are buttons for manipulating chains:

Buttons for manipulating chains