Re: unformated timeticks

Louis A. Mamakos (louie@TransSys.COM)
Thu, 09 Nov 1995 00:06:16 -0500

> The real question is whether this default formatting makes sense for
> TimeTick values. It is nice if you just want to display the value but
> annoying when you do computations (and sysUpTime is quite important
> for most computations). I could remove the default formatting for
> TimeTick values, but this would be somewhat inconsistent (since all
> other values are formatted per default).

I agree; I've found that in most cases, I really need to do arithmetic
on TimeTick values. I think that in the past, I instigated the
current facility to "unparse" the timeticks back into the raw form.

> So there is obviously a need to control if automatic formatting should
> happen or not. The question is how to control this in a flexible (and
> readable) way. Are there any ideas out there?

An approach you might consider is what was in tclnm some time ago; the
formatting functions were actually TCL function invocations which
would be passed the "raw" values, the OID, and the syntax and would
return a string. An option which could be applied to an operation
would be to override the default formatting function with one which
the use could specify. It was then pretty easy to supply a "null"
formatting fuction that just returned an integer value.

louie