As mentioned above, there are several different ways to access internal information from the Event and Packet objects. Typically you will want to get the "real raw data" to debug your code, to develop or improve the decoding (unpacking) routines, or to just list the contents of the Event or identify the type of Event or Packet object you got.

It is very important that the unpacking routines (which are normally developed and certified by the subsystem experts) become part of the event handling system once they are stable. If you keep them as "private" routines in your code, other users will get different results if they use the system with a different unpacking routine.

The levels of access to internal data are:
For Event objects:

• get envelope information
• copy the whole raw data portion (including headers) to a user-specified location.

Packet objects have a richer set of access functions:

• get envelope information;
• dump the data to some output stream in a packet-specific way;
• dump the data to some output stream in a generic way;
• copy the whole packet data portion with packet header to a user-specified location;
• copy the whole packet data portion without packet header to a user-specified location.