DARC communication modules

The chemical system and the DBMS or the text retrieval system had to communicate together. To solve this problem Telesystemes has developed the DARC Communication Modules. The first version was released in 1986 and the software has been continuously improved from that date. 

Development Criteria. The development of the DARC Communication Modules took into consideration criteria which were considered as essential to build a chemical information system which meets the requirements of the researchers, while being easy to set up and to maintain. 

Based on that first criterion, the DARC Communication Modules have been developed in such a way that they provide DARC-SMS with an easy and quick access to the DBMS data, but also easy and quick access to the chemical structures stored in DARC-SMS, from the DBMS, as well as easy cross search, starting either from DARC-SMS or from the DBMS. 

The second criterion considered was related to access to the DBMS search capabilities. Since DBMSs have proven their ability to fulfill the needs of researchers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries as well as in other fields of activity, it appeared to be essential that for cross searches, the DARC Communication Modules give full access to a DBMS session, or limited access depending on the needs or the allowance of the users. 

To meet that requirement the DARC Communication Modules are based on a communication protocol (COM PROT in Figures 1-3) which takes advantage of all the capabilities of the VMS operating systems of Digital Equipment Corporation... 

The DARC Communication Modules have been especially designed for the VAX and its VMS operating system, which have become the de facto standard for hardware and operating systems for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. 

The DARC Communication Modules currently installed with VMS 4.7 have been tested by Telesystemes with VMS 5 and only minor modifications have been required. Future releases of the DARC Communications Modules will take better advantage of the multiprocessor hardware environment of the new VAX series. As the current design of these modules is already based on parallel processing, the new VAX/VMS design appears to fit perfectly with the DARC Communication Modules concept. 

The DISPLAY CN module brings extra capabilities based on the reporting facilities of DARC-RDS2, giving access from the DBMS to the complete display capabilities of DARC-SMS including the FILL communication module. 

When using the INPUT CN communication module the DARC-SMS registration menu appears like a submenu of the DBMS application. 

Display or Print of DBMS Data in DARC-SMS the FILL Module. The purpose of the FILL module is to allow the display or print of DBMS data in screen formats (see Figures 5-6) and the print of DBMS data in paper formats (A4) on PostScript laser printers (see Figure 7), both being defined using the DARC-RDS2 (Report Definition System 2) module (see Figure 8). The set-up of the FILL module is performed through the customization of the FILL Communication Protocol. 

DISPLAY Module. The DISPLAY module can be called from any DBMS application to display a chemical structure in a graphics window, according to the needs of that application without any access to DARC-SMS. Indeed the DISPLAY communication protocol gives access to the DARC-SMS data base and performs the chemical structure display in the appropriate window (see Figure 9). 

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