Bert was designed to facilitate channel building. Bert's connect-the-block approach to building channels helps you visualize the flow of product within iPAM. Bert consists primarily of a "drawing" or "design" area with a few supporting buttions above and below that area.

Note: When Bert starts up it has NO knowledge of any iPAM agents (Inputs, Handlers, or Outputs, also known as PIMs, Jugglers, and DIMs). You must first connect to an iPAM. Then you can then create new configurations.

The example above is the graphical view of the example configuration included with iPAM as 0checkpts/examples/startExample1.txt. This example has one source, one handler, and one output.  This is also the test configuration created by the statup wizard.

To create a new agent click on the right mouse button in the design area. On Macintosh's Ctrl-Click is the same as right mouse click. You will get a hierachical popup menu of availble agents. Select the one you want and it will appear in the design area at the postion of the mouse click.

To connect two agents click and release the left mouse button on the agent that you are connecting FROM. You must click near the output "nub" on the block. Then you can move the mouse over to the agent that you want to connect TO. Click and release on the destination agent and the connection should appear.

Bert Feedback Line

In the lower left corner of the window is an area used by Bert to display status messages and context dependent information. In the example above the line reads "output (putDIM1)." This is because the mouse was moved over the box named "output". This is an agent of type "putDIM1".  PutDIM1 is one of the many types of available output agents.

Bert Buttons

The Do.. button activates a popup menu with several functions: The Reload button causes the current configuration to get reloaded from the remote iPAM server.

The Submit button allows you to save any configuration changes back to iPAM. It is similar to the "Save to Server " popup menu function but more convenient.