Re: How to get a list of all available PVs

[Michael Davidsaver <mdavidsaver@bnl.gov>]

On 12/17/2012 6:14 AM, Carlos Pascual wrote:
> Ronaldo,
> Thanks for the tip.
>
> I looked at channel finder docs and I gather that somehow one needs to manually
> add the info to the directory itself. I mean, that the channel finder cannot by
> itself discover available PVs.
>
> If possible I would like to avoid such requirement of manually creating the
> database.

At NSLS2 the process to automatically keep channelfinder up to date is this:

Each IOC init script ends with

> dbl > records.dbl
> system "cp records.dbl /cf-update/$HOSTNAME.$IOCNAME.dbl"

The two variables are set from the environment by a shell wrapper script 
for Linux systems, and manually for RTEMS systems.

The location /cf-update is exported from an NFS server and mounted by 
all IOC host systems.  The NFS server has a process which monitors for 
new/updated files in this directory.

http://channelfinder.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/channelfinder/python.channelfinder.api/file/f0d7b9404db3/cf_monitor.sh

When a record list is updated the cf-update-ioc script is run which 
handles sending the new information to the channelfinder service.

Once the NFS server has been setup this works fairly well.  The ongoing 
problem is to ensure that all IOCs create a record listing file.  Also, 
by design the cf-update-ioc script only adds records, so it a 
maintenance task to periodically purge orphaned entries.

Michael