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PROGRAMMING GUIDE

Contents

Programming with Exchange

Working with the Exchange API

Parsing a PRC File

Creating a PRC file that uses boundary representation

Creating a tessellation entity for representing faceted objects

Data types, naming conventions, and character encoding

The Exchange API has unique names for basic data types. Here are the basic types from the HOOPS Exchange library: A3DInt8, A3DInt16, A3DInt32, A3DUns8, A3DUns16, A3DUns32, and A3DBool.

The Exchange API declares all non-basic types, which fall into these general categories:

PRC entities: Correspond to the non-terminal structures in the PRC format, such as product occurrences, tessellation base data, and texture transformations. Your software uses NULL pointers to reference PRC entities.

Data structures: Contain the data used to create a PRC entity. Data structures can also receive the data obtained from parsing a PRC entity. There is one data structure for each type of PRC entity.

The HOOPS Exchange API uses a naming convention that is largely self-documenting. The name for each function, structure, enumeration, and enumerator provides clues as to its type, its relationship to a PRC entity described in the PRC format, and its role relative to that PRC entity.

Character encoding is UTF-8, which uses the character encoding scheme described by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) document UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646. That document is available at http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629.