Clients and Servers

While exploring a library like BACpypes, take full advantage of Python being an interpreted language with an interactive prompt! The code for this tutorial is also available in the Tutorial subdirectory of the repository.

This tutorial will be using comm.Client, comm.Server classes, and the comm.bind() function, so start out by importing them:

>>> from bacpypes.comm import Client, Server, bind

Since the server needs to do something when it gets a request, it needs to provide a function to get it:

>>> class MyServer(Server):
...     def indication(self, arg):
...         print('working on', arg)
...         self.response(arg.upper())
...

Now create an instance of this new class and bind the client and server together:

>>> c = Client()
>>> s = MyServer()
>>> bind(c, s)

This only solves the downstream part of the problem, as you can see:

>>> c.request('hi')
('working on ', 'hi')
Traceback....
....
NotImplementedError: confirmation must be overridden

So now we create a custom client class that does something with the response:

>>> class MyClient(Client):
...     def confirmation(self, pdu):
...         print('thanks for the ', pdu)
...

Create an instance of it, bind the client and server together and test it:

>>> c = MyClient()
>>> bind(c, s)
>>> c.request('hi')
('working on ', 'hi')
('thanks for ', 'HI')

Success!