[Ns-developers] Node names

[Tom Henderson]

Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 02:30 -0400, Joseph Kopena wrote:
> 
>> Minor note that if this is enabled/promoted, users will expect and it
>> would be useful to be able to use those names in attribute and trace
>> paths:
>>
>>   Config::Connect("/NodeList/my meaningful
>> name/DeviceList/*/$ns3::WifiNetDevice/Tx",
>>                   MakeBoundCallback(&TxCallback, totalTx));
>>
>> Ditto for devices possibly.
> 
> Yeah, but that is not going to happen unless someone puts serious
> thinking in designing a syntax for that and implementing it in the
> Config code. A couple of people suggested to tom that we re-use the
> XPath syntax and that is a great idea but doing so would require that:
>   - we define a mapping from our data structures to XML
>   - we get an XPath implementation in ns-3 (or use an external library)
>   - generate an in-memory XML tree from our data structures
>   - apply the XPath matching library to the XML tree
>   - get the matches, use them to apply the changes to the underlying
> data structures.
> 
> All of the above is perfectly feasible but it is a lot of work. Hint:
> patches are welcome :)

Returning to this thread, I did not patch the trace path system, but I 
did create a patch to restore node names and to make it easy to fetch 
nodes and devices by name.  Comments?
http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=215

- Tom