recordGenerator record

["Kalantari Babak" <BABAK.KALANTARI@psi.ch>]

Hi all,

I have spent some time on writing a new EPICS record type which can
create new record instances at IOC runtime. At the moment the code is in
very preliminary level but it works. "It works" means I am able to
generate instances of almost any record types at IOC runtime. The
behavior is as the following:

1. User specifies record type e.g. "ao", "calc", etc. by CA/DB-write to
a field of "recordGenerator" record 

2. User specifies the channel name by CA/DB-write to a field of
"recordGenerator" record

- As a result a channel with soft device support (soft channel) with
corresponding type and name is generated. 

The generated records behave like a normal record which is generated at
init time from static EPICS database (template files). They can be
accessed by clients, linked to other records, etc. I have mainly used
facilities provided by "dbStatic" library to do this implementation. I
had some difficulties with lock-sets but made a work-around just to get
it working, but I believe it can be done in a proper way. 

One potential usage of this may be to have (soft) waveform records which
can have changeable size. One way to do this is to copy the content of
the generated waveform record, then delete existing record and generate
another one with the new size and fill it in with the data copied from
the previous waveform.

The questions to me are:

1. are there any interests (now/in future) in such a record type, in
another word, is it worth at all to put efforts for such thing? 

2. (if yes) what features such record type can/must have?

Any idea/comment is welcome.  

Regards,
Babak

===============
Babak Kalantari,  
Embedded Software Group,  
Paul Scherrer Institute, CH-5232 Villigen PSI
Tel:+41 56 310 5122  http://www.psi.ch/