The purpose of this FileHandler is to provide a means of analyzing the binary form of ASN.1 data. Such data might arise as a capture of a networking communication session data stream or by storing for example an X.500 certificate to a file in DER or CER format.

The data can be loaded and examined piece by piece while showing the hierarchical relationship and structure.

In case only standardized data types are being used in the encoded data, all information can be represented in the examination user interface. If, however, custom tags are being used to denote the nature of each structure, that information is not available to the FileHandler at the moment and thus only the binary objects can be separated. In that case it is still possible to manually examine such a binary object as any of the known (and standardized) basic data types, but this doesn't happen automatically.

Furthermore as there is currently no means of loading the ASN.1 syntax definition file which specifies the data to be analyzed, any naming information is not available. That means that the names of the individual fields of the structured types are not known and can thus not be presented. They are named based on their index on which they appear in the structure instead.

This might not deliver all the information possible when examining data of a known nature but allows to analyze any data that conforms to the BER. Additional support for loading an ASN.1 syntax definition might be added in the future to provide the naming information provided therein.

The FileHandler is a pure viewer and thus doesn't support any modification of the loaded data or saving it in any form.