ASN.1 Studio

ASN.1 Studio® is a powerful IDE included with several of the OSS ASN.1 products on the Windows and Linux platforms. You can use ASN.1 Studio to graphically create or modify ASN.1 values, without writing any code.

The Challenge

Many standard protocols are specified using ASN.1. The use of ASN.1 makes them easier to read and implement compared to other specification techniques, such as tabular descriptions.

However, for ASN.1 specifications of any size and complexity, there is a need for a software tool that helps specification writers or application developers perform such tasks as decoding a message, viewing a message in a human-readable form, and creating sample messages and encodings. This becomes particularly important for large and rapidly evolving protocols, where two or more specifications are used in combination.

Meet the Challenge

ASN.1 Studio is OSS Nokalva's answer to that need. ASN.1 Studio's many features support the needs of different classes of ASN.1 users, facilitate testing and debugging of protocol implementations, and prevent the introduction of encoding/decoding errors. No training or programming is necessary for its use. In a short time you will be able to build and verify ASN.1 messages and encodings.

The first thing you usually do after launching the tool is to open an ASN.1 specification. That ASN.1 specification can either be one of the standard ones that are included in the ASN.1 Studio installation, or any valid ASN.1 specification available. You then create new messages, modify or analyze existing messages, or perform any of the other activities supported by the tool.

ASN.1 Studio Features

Code generation

Depending on the language supported by the product you purchased, ASN.1 Studio is capable of generating C, C++, C# or Java source code from the ASN.1 specification. For example, if you purchased ASN.1 Tools for C, you will be able to generate the .c and .h files that you need to use in your development with ASN.1 Studio instead of the ASN.1/C command-line compiler.

ASN.1 Editor

You can create, modify, and view ASN.1 specification files using the powerful visual editor which is specifically designed for editing ASN.1 notation.

• Reliable, conformant ASN.1 parsing – ASN.1 Studio is built upon the renowned ASN.1 compiler technology from OSS Nokalva, which fully supports the latest ASN.1 standards.
• Helpful error identification - precise and informative parsing messages
• Importing from Microsoft Word – ASN.1 Studio can automatically detect and extract an ASN.1 specification from a Microsoft Word file
• A set of commonly used ASN.1 specifications from various standards is included

Message Viewer/Editor

ASN.1 Studio can handle messages encoded in any of the standard ASN.1 encoding rules (BER, CER, DER, PER, XER, and E-XER).

• Reliable, conformant ASN.1 encoding/decoding – ASN.1 Studio is built on the robust and proven ASN.1 encoding/decoding technology from OSS Nokalva.
• The Value Editor displays a message in a tree view.
• Unrestricted message manipulations - create, load from file, modify, save, re-encode to a different encoding - for example, a PER message can be re-encoded and saved in XML format

• Immediate encoding and feedback when modifying the message
• Enumerations and choice alternatives are presented as drop-down lists, thus preventing the input of illegal values for those types.

Specialized Message Viewers

ASN.1 Studio has the ability to display message encodings in a variety of formats depending on the encoding rule used. The following viewers are included.

• An ASN.1 value notation viewer, which can display any ASN.1 value, including those defined within the ASN.1 specification.
• A basic hexadecimal viewer, which can be used with all standard encoding rules.
• A BER encoding viewer, which can be used with BER, DER, and CER, and shows the details of an encoding (tags, lengths, and values).
• A PER encoding viewer, which can be used with both PER Aligned and PER Unaligned variants, to show even the bit-level details of an encoding.
• An XER encoding viewer, which can be used with Basic XER and Extended XER, to handle XML text.

These viewers are powerful tools in the hands of a specification writer or implementer, as they describe each bit or group of bits in the encoding and relate them to the definitions in the ASN.1 specification. For example, you can make a change in a definition and see the effects of that change in the PER encoding, or you can analyze an encoded message that was received or produced by your application.