1. Introduction
1.1. General Description
The MAINSAIL Structure Blaster is a set of PROCEDUREs that
manipulate entire MAINSAIL data structures as a unit.
Structure Blaster PROCEDUREs can read large data structures
composed of dynamic objects from or
write them to a file
with a single PROCEDURE call.
Given a POINTER to a dynamic object
(the “root” of the structure), the Structure Blaster can write
all dynamic objects
and STRING text accessible from the root
POINTER to the output file.
If the output file is a data file, the structure can be
written as a “data image”;
if it is a text file, as a “text form” or “compressed text form”;
and if it is either a data or a text file, as a “PDF image”
(Portable Data Format image).
The image or text form can also be
read back into memory and the structure re-created with a single
PROCEDURE call.
The Structure Blaster
can also be used to dispose of a structure, make a
copy of a structure,
compare two structures,
obtain information about a data or PDF image,
or convert a data image into a text form or a text form into
a data image.
Structure Blaster output is not necessarily portable.
It is your responsibility to port your
data image files
from operating system to operating system and MAINSAIL
version to MAINSAIL version, if necessary; see Section 2.4.
1.2. Version
This version of the MAINSAIL Structure Blaster User's Guide is current as of the proposed
Version 16.30.1 of MAINSAIL (which has not yet been released).
The Structure Blaster version is 10 as of MAINSAIL Version
16.30.