Second AMI Phase: Describing the Methods

After the manager and application have exchanged announcement or discovery messages, the manager then sends a message asking the application to describe its methods. Every instrumented application must implement these methods.

Figure 102: AMI Method Description

The message sent to the manager in describe method has nested inside it a series of messages that describe each method. These are known as method descriptor messages. Each method descriptor message has messages nested inside it, which describe the types of arguments and types of returns applicable to each method. This is illustrated in Figure 102. From this description, the manager determines what structure of message to send when invoking the method, as well as how to interpret the message the application sends back.

At the end of the method description phase, the manager is aware of all message exchanges supported by the application and is ready to begin sending messages of the specified types.