Channel Management

1
Channel Management

• Andreas Lüdeke
• Swiss Light Source / PSI
• 20 May 2003
• EPICS Collaboration Meeting

2
Introduction
Configuration
CA- Clients

• medm
• Alarmhandler
• ...

• Display Configuration
• Machine Model
• ...
• Channels

CA- Servers

• Channels
• ...
• Procedures
• Hardware Configuration

• EPICS IOCs
• Portable CA Servers

3
Questions to Answer

• Server Developers
• Which of my channels are used?
• Whos using those channels?
• Client Developers
• Is my channel configuration ok?
• Where was a disconnected channel once served?
• Operations Manager
• Will all client applications still work?

4
Plan

• Keep track of all provided channels
• IOC name
• Channel Name and Record Type
• Fields of those Record
• Keep track of all required channels
• Client application name, start-up arguments
• Channel name, field
• Provide set of scripts to answer the questions

5
SLS Implementation
Database
g.adl
Clients
h.alh
i.conf
Server
EPICS IOCs
6
Server Implementation
EPICS IOC
Database
Boot Host
startup.script
7
Parser Implementation
Database
Config. Files
Parser
Launcher Configuration
extract channels and commands
8
Parser e.g. medm

• Extract all references of channels
• Configuration files can be templates
• Reads macro substitution from command line
• Parser does substitution
• Recursion
• Calls of related panels and commands ? call
  parser
• Prevent infinite recursions ? each combination of
  command and arguments is only parsed once!

9
Database Implementation
Application Config Channels
Application Config Files
IOC Channels
Record Type Definition

• IOC
• Device
• Property
• Record Type
• Load Date
• Deleted Date

• Record Type
• Field
• Field Type

• Filename
• Macrovar
• Device
• Property
• Field

• Filename
• Config File
• Load Date

10
SQL Queries

• Check of a single high level appl. config file
• Get all config files with unsupported channels
• Get all properties of a device
• Public properties, used by some applications
• Private properties, used by no application
• Get all IOCs with a certain device or property
• Check naming convention of provided channels

11
How to make it Generic?

• Parsing should be featured by the tools
• Extract channel names (medm -GetChannels )
• Extract command lines (medm -GetCommands )
• Site specific configuration
• Naming convention (_at_SLS Device Property
  . Field)
• Repository of command lines (_at_SLS Launcher)
• Environment variables for config file locations
• Database table access

12
Outlook

• Central channel repository
• Add IOC link repository (dbcar2odb)
• High level application testing
• Adding versioning / CVS tag information
• Bind to software release mechanism
• Automatic periodic background checks
• Add more tools to query database
• Make it a generic EPICS extension