Question regarding indexes in Mib tables.

[Paresh Borkar]

Hi,

I have a question regarding use of indexes for rows in a mib table. The
documentation for MibTable class says that for an variable sized object,
the object is converted to an oid value by first encoding the length of
its value and then its value. For example if I have an index of type
octetstr with a value "abc", then it would be encoded as "3.97.98.99".

My question is: is it required to pass in string indexes as above. Can't
one pass in the index string value as is?
I have seen that passing the string as is does not work, or am I missing
something here.

Also, the above technique ensures that the index is always a number
dotted sequence. Is there any function in agent++/snmp++ library that
does the above conversion?

Regards,
Paresh.