Currently, _unnamed* fields (which are created by omitting the id key in seq attributes) do not appear in object trees of either the Web IDE or the console visualizer. This is bad because the "unnamed fields" feature was added to KS mainly to make reverse-engineering work easier, because it saves you from having to assign bogus ids for fields with unknown purpose manually. But the fact that these unnamed fields are not visible in visualizers defeats their utility for reverse-engineering, because you need to see the values of these yet unknown fields to figure out their purpose over time. @GreyCat confirmed that this is how unnamed fields should be handled in https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct/issues/52#issuecomment-262875543:
Saving them (and even interpreting them as some proposed type) actually serves a very important function: you can view them in the visualizer. May be at first they won't make any sense (beyond seeing that it's a 4-byte long integer, for example), but at some moment later during reversing you might understand what it is - and, voila, all you have is to slap a name on it.
Personally, while working on the coreldraw_cdr.ksy specification and using ksdump a lot to generate JSON dumps showing how real files are parsed, I realized I need to see the unnamed fields in the dumps in order to progress in reverse engineering, so I was patching ksdump locally to display them:
Currently,
_unnamed*fields (which are created by omitting theidkey inseqattributes) do not appear in object trees of either the Web IDE or the console visualizer. This is bad because the "unnamed fields" feature was added to KS mainly to make reverse-engineering work easier, because it saves you from having to assign bogusids for fields with unknown purpose manually. But the fact that these unnamed fields are not visible in visualizers defeats their utility for reverse-engineering, because you need to see the values of these yet unknown fields to figure out their purpose over time. @GreyCat confirmed that this is how unnamed fields should be handled in https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct/issues/52#issuecomment-262875543:Personally, while working on the
coreldraw_cdr.ksyspecification and usingksdumpa lot to generate JSON dumps showing how real files are parsed, I realized I need to see the unnamed fields in the dumps in order to progress in reverse engineering, so I was patchingksdumplocally to display them:lib/kaitai/struct/visualizer/obj_to_h.rb:30
But there's no reason why
ksdump(or Web IDE) shouldn't handle this correctly out of the box.