Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]> · Fri, 9 Mar 2018 11:35:21 +0100

Thanks. Don't hurry. At the moment learning Perl is not so high on my

prio list. Maybe I simply redirect dbli to a file and compare it from

the C test program.

I took out channel access and data base access to info fields for now,

leaving only the dbli function. So now neither caget nor dbgf or links

work. Tell me if you want to have db access back.

I had to push --force the branch to the previous state without ca.

I will move database and channel access to a different branch.

BTW: I tested info fields with .[{$ in the name and they worked with

caget. However if you have info items "name" and "name$" in the same

record in this order and you ask for "name$" you will get "name" as a

char array, not "name$" as a string. But "name$$" gives you "name$" as a

char array. (Actually needs single quotes to prevent the shell from

interpreting $$. Same for $ in the middle.) If you have the order

reversed you cannot get "name" as a char array because "name$" gives you

"name$" as a string. All in all: works as expected.

Space in the name did not work.

Dirk

On 08.03.2018 23:07, Andrew Johnson wrote:

Hi Dirk,

On 03/08/2018 07:15 AM, Dirk Zimoch wrote:

Now I would like to add tests. Is there already support to compare shell
function output with expected output?

Where to put the test? I want to test the shell function as well as
channel access.

The easiest way to write that kind of test might be in Perl. There is a
Perl IOC module that can start an IOC as a sub-process, feed it iocsh
commands and return their responses, then shut down the IOC again. It
only works with Base-3.16 or later though since it has to be able to
disable GNU readline for the iocsh communication to work properly.

The perl CA library doesn't build or run on Windows, but we would just
not try to build or run those tests on Windows.

The IOC.pm module is used in Marty Kraimer's exampleCPP PVA module in a
fairly simple way to run other test programs after starting an IOC, but
it has more capabilities that he is actually using. I have written
programs that start an IOC, connect to it over CA, do CA puts/gets and
use the built-in dbpf/dbgf commands to put/get data. It's very easy to
send your own iocsh commands and get back a multi-line response, as long
as the command is synchronous (no background tasks!).

It does need some better documentation to be written though which is why
I haven't added it to Base as a module yet, but I'd be willing to do
that if you're interested in using it. Just don't expect it tomorrow...

- Andrew

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System