Network

TCP Client

The TCP Client node provides the ability to send simple text commands to a TCP server socket. This server can be a video mixer, a video routing system, lighting controller, etc. The server socket is specified in the properties Address (IP address or hostname) and Port.

Encoding defines the encoding to be used to encode the message text. An optional EndOfText character can also be defined. This character is appended to each message send out to the server.

A TCP Client node defines its message to be send to the server by its Custom Model. The only custom model item that can be added is a Method type. If a Method is added, two members will appear in the Property Editor:

• A string property with the name prefix Out which holds the actual message text. This text will be  HTML/XML decoded, therefore sending binary data is also possible. Please note that the & sign needs to be written in its encoded form &.The Convert to Text Node can be used to format any text into an HTML/XML encoded string.
• A method with the name prefix Send. Invoking this method will encode the message, add the end-of-text character and send out the message to the server.

If a message is send to a server, the node processes the following steps:

1. Connect to the server if not connected yet or connection has been lost.
2. Purge the input buffer. Responses from the server are ignored!
3. Send data to the socket.
4. If the server closed the connection (timeout) jump to step 1 and try again.
5. Report any errors.

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