ASN.1 Debugging/Printing

ASN.1 encoding or decoding is always performed on the entire PDU or message, which often consists of a large number of elements organized in a complex structure. When encoding or decoding fails, finding which element caused the error might be difficult. To make encoding or decoding easier to troubleshoot, you can use the ValueNotationFormatter runtime trace or print class: every C# representation type can be printed or converted into an ASN.1 value string using ToString() or the ValueNotationFormatter class, which offers more formatting options.

Example:

 using VNF = Oss.Asn1.ValueNotationFormatter;
 . . .
// two lines below are equivalent
Console.WriteLine(pdu.ToString());
Console.WriteLine(pdu);

// print with options
VNF.Options.IndentSize = 10;
VNF.Options.NewLine = "\n";
VNF.Print(pdu);

// log to file
StreamWriter log = new StreamWriter("log.txt");

VNF.Print(pdu, log);