What is the difference between the IAAPI and the basic encoder/decoder API?

While the basic SOED API is interpretive when it comes to encoding/decoding, it allows you to directly work with the decoded data as an ordinary C structure.

However, IAAPI, which uses the SOED for encoding/decoding, does not allow you to directly work with the decoded data. Instead, it requires you to determine at runtime what the PDU number is, what the associated ASN.1 type is, how many fields are in PDU, what is the type of the first field in the PDU, whether the first field is mandatory or optional, whether the value is actually present in the encoding, and on and on. It is perfect for browsers and similar applications that learn about the messages they are working with at runtime.

Contrast this with most applications which have a very good idea at development time what messages the application will support. But the penalty is that the IAAPI has high processing overhead when compared to directly referencing instances of C structures that the ASN.1 compiler generates.

For more information, see the Interpretive ASN.1 API section.

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