www.riscos.com Technical Support: Programmer's Reference Manual

NetStatus

Introduction and Overview

The NetStatus module controls the display of an hourglass on the screen whenever there is prolonged activity on the Econet.

It claims EconetV, and examines the reason for each call that is made to the vector. It in turn makes an appropriate call to the Hourglass module, so that the appearance of the Hourglass indicates the status of the net. The Hourglass has two 'LEDs', one on top and one on the bottom:

• if only the top LED is on, then your station is trying to receive
• if only the bottom LED is on, then your station is trying to transmit
• if both LEDs are on, then your station is waiting for a broadcast reply.

It also displays percentage figures (when it is able to do so meaningfully) which show the percentage of a transfer that has completed.

Technical Details

This table shows how NetStatus converts the reason codes for calls to EconetV (listed in the chapter entitled Software vectors) into the SWI calls that it makes to the Hourglass module:

Reason code	SWI call
NetFS_Start...	Hourglass_On
NetFS_Part...	Hourglass_Percentage
NetFS_Finish...	Hourglass_Off
NetFS_StartWait	Hourglass_LEDs (both on)
Econet_StartTransmission	Hourglass_LEDs (only top one on)
Econet_StartReception	Hourglass_LEDs (only bottom one on)
NetFS_FinishWait	Hourglass_LEDs (both off)
Econet_FinishTransmission	Hourglass_LEDs (both off)
Econet_FinishReception	Hourglass_LEDs (both off)

Versions of RISC OS after 2.0 also change the colour of the hourglass for Broadcast Load and Save calls (as made by the Broadcast Loader). The colours used are:

Type of call	Colours
Broadcast Load	Green/blue
Broadcast Save	Red/blue