Bert was designed to facilitate channel building.
Bert's connect-the-block approach to building channels helps you visualize
the flow of product within iPAM. Bert consists primarily of a "drawing"
or "design" area with a few supporting buttions above and below that area.
Note: When Bert starts up it has NO knowledge of any iPAM agents (Inputs,
Handlers, or Outputs, also known as PIMs, Jugglers, and DIMs). You must
first connect to an iPAM. Then you can then create new configurations.
The example above is the graphical view of the example configuration
included with iPAM as 0checkpts/examples/startExample1.txt. This example
has one source, one handler, and one output. This is also the test
configuration created by the statup wizard.
To create a new agent click on the right mouse button in the design
area. On Macintosh's Ctrl-Click is the same as right mouse click. You will
get a hierachical popup menu of availble agents. Select the one you want
and it will appear in the design area at the postion of the mouse click.
To connect two agents click and release the left mouse button on the
agent that you are connecting FROM. You must click near the output "nub"
on the block. Then you can move the mouse over to the agent that you want
to connect TO. Click and release on the destination agent and the connection
should appear.
Bert Feedback Line
In the lower left corner of the window is an area used by Bert to display
status messages and context dependent information. In the example above
the line reads "output (putDIM1)." This is because the mouse was moved
over the box named "output". This is an agent of type "putDIM1".
PutDIM1 is one of the many types of available output agents.
Bert Buttons
The
Do.. button
activates a popup menu with several functions:
-
Open iPAM Server - a running iPAM server. Bert uses
TCP/IP and the HTTP protocol to communication with the remote iPAM server.
Thus Bert can work through firewalls that will pass HTTP requests from
Bert to iPAM.
-
Open iPAM State File - A local configuration file,
usually the result of an iPAM checkpoint
-
Save to Server - saves the current configuration to
a iPAM server
-
Save to File - for future iPAM use
-
Autolayout - helps to "unscramble" large and confusing
layouts
-
Quit
The
Reload
button causes the current configuration to get reloaded from the remote
iPAM server.
The Submit
button
allows you to save any configuration changes back to iPAM. It is similar
to the "Save to Server " popup menu function but more convenient.