Manual

SECS Message Detail 4-1
4. SECS Message Detail
This section describes each message sent or understood by the Equipment.
4.1 SML Notation
Message descriptions are shown using "SECS Message Language" (SML) notation.
SML is a general notation developed by GW Associates for describing SECS
messages. SML is similar to the notation used in the SECS Standards documents,
but SML is a more precise and regular notation. In SML, the format for a data item
is as follows:
< type [ count ] value >
The components are:
<> Angle Brackets. Each Data Item is enclosed within angle brackets ("less
than", "greater than"). This notation implies that each Data Item has a Data Item
Format and Data Item Length as required by SECS-II.
type
This specifies the SECS-II Data Item format. It will have one of the following
values:
AASCII
BBinary
J JIS-8
I1, I2, I4, I8 Signed Integers
U1, U2, U4, U8 Unsigned Integers
F4, F8 Floating Point
BOOLEAN True/False
count
Count of the element values that make up the item. If present, the count is enclosed
within square brackets "[ ]". The count may be omitted, in which case the square
brackets are also omitted.
The "count" specifies the number of value elements in the Data Item Value. For
String formats (ASCII, Binary, JIS-8), "count" specifies the number of characters i
the string. For Numeric formats (I1, I2, I4, I8, U1, U2, U4, U8, F4, F8,
BOOLEAN), "count" specifies the number of values in the array. For simple scalar
numeric values, "count" is usually "1". For LIST items, "count" specifies the
number of items in the list.