Glossary

An Action is a method call on a Service, which encapsulated a single piece of functionality. Actions can have multiple input and output arguments, and can return error codes. UPnP allows one of the output arguments to be marked as the return value, but GUPnP doesn't treat return values specially.

Every action argument has a related State Variable, which determines the type of the argument. Note that even if the argument wouldn't need a state variable it is still required, due to historical reasons.

A Control Point is an entity on the network which communicates with other Devices and Services. In the client/server model the control point is a client and the Service is a server, although it is common for devices to also be a control point because whilst a single control point/service connection is client/server, the UPnP network as whole is peer-to-peer.

A Device is an entity on the network which communicates using the UPnP standards. This can be a dedicated physical device such as a router or printer, or a PC which is running software implementing the UPnP standards.

A Device can contain sub-devices, for example a combination printer/scanner could appear as a general device with a printer sub-device and a scanner sub-device.

Every device has zero or more Services. UPnP defines many standard device types, which specify services which are required to be implemented. Alternatively, a non-standard device type could be used. Examples of standard device types are MediaRenderer or InternetGatewayDevice.

See Also Service.

An XML schema used to represent digital content metadata. Defined by the UPnP Forum.

A Service is a collection of related methods (called Actions) and public variables (called State Variables) which together form a logical interface.

UPnP defines standard services that define actions and variables which must be present and their semantics. Examples of these are AVTransport and WANIPConnection.

See Also Action, Device, State Variable.

An XML document which defines the set of Actions and State Variables that a Service implements.

See Also Service, Action, State Variable.

UPnP device discovery protocol. Specifies how Devices advertise their Services in the network and also how Control Points search for services and devices respond.

See Also Device, Control Point, Service.

A State Variable is a public variable exposing some aspect of the service's state. State variables are typed and optionally are evented, which means that any changes will be notified. Control points are said to subscribe to a state variable to receive change notifications.

A a unique identifier which is unique for every device but never changes for each particular device.

A common practise is to generate a unique UDN on first boot from a random seed, or use some unique and persistent property such as the device's MAC address to create the UDN.

See Also Device.