Accept associations from peers without calling AET

[Erik]

I have experienced that some SCU do not provide there AET when initializing an association. This will result in the error "Illegal service parameter: Calling AP Title" from the constructAssociatePDU function. I wounder if it is advisable to solve this problem by accepting calling AP Titles with zero length if Peers Format is set to "ANY" in the imagectn configuration file or could this lead to other problems? The calling AET should be set to "UNKNOWNAET" or something similar. Any advice in this question would be much appreciated.

Best regards
Erik

[Marco Eichelberg]

This error is indeed raised in constructAssociatePDU(), which is a low-level function responsible for examining the incoming A-ASSOCIATE-RQ PDU within the network module. Since the calling AE title is a required entry in the A-ASSOCIATE-RQ PDU, the association request is not well-formed. It would certainly be possible to provide a work-around for faulty SCUs at this point and map the missing AE titles to an empty string or some dummy string. If you want to make this work with imagectn/dcmqrscp, please note that the syntax of the configuration file for that tool will not permit you to specify an "empty" aetitle - changing the configuration file parser might actually be more complex than using a dummy aetitle such as "aetitle_missing" in the network module. I would be interested to hear which system is sending such PDUs.