Milestone Analytics 2.2 Generic VA Interface - Manual (Page 9)

Milestone XProtect Analytics 2.2 Generic VA Interface; Developer’s Manual
www.milestonesys.com Page 9 Architecture & Data Flow
the original alert XML can be stored. In the future, if vendors would like to create their own
interface, special and highly vendor-related information can still be pulled out.
Surely, there are various attempts to create industry standards for this particular purpose, and one
could argue in favor of using such industry standards instead of creating our own. Furthermore,
there are several companies pushing out their version of the alert format. However, as long as all
companies do not agree on using one common format for handling real time alert information and
analytics data in general, the Milestone Alert Data is a very pragmatic way of handling and
eliminating the differences between the VCA systems and their formats respectively.
The MAD-format is XML based, like most of the existing alert formats, and is defined by the XSD
(XML Schema Definition) file Alert.xsd that can be found in the Xsd folder in the distribution. The
following figure shows the structure of the alert format in a more visual way:
Graphical representation of the XSD structure; for a larger version of the illustration, see Appendix B
Alert API
To create MAD-formatted alerts, we have implemented a .NET-based API where alerts can be
created programmatically. The key-advantage gained by using the API instead of just building the
XML as concatenation of substring is of course to guarantee the integrity and validity of the XML.
All the relevant classes in the API have support for COM interfaces which means that the API can
be used from native C++ code as well. In the samples folder, a Visual Studio 2005 project