Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

> 1) Is there a way automatically to make an autosave-request file for a given database file, or for a given set of database files?
>
> No, because only the database author knows which PVs should be restored to put the database back in the

Maybe. The trick consist in generating the req file with an IOC that only load the db files you want to autosave.
The question then becomes how can you easily change the loaded db files in an IOC
A trick I commonly use is the 'include' directive of iocsh
In short,

< ${DBL_DIR}/device1_preIocInit.dbl
#< ${DBL_DIR}/device2_preIocInit.db
< ${DBL_DIR}/device3_preIocInit.dbl
< ${DBL_DIR}/autosave_preIocInit.dbl
iocInit
< ${DBL_DIR}/device1_postIocInit.dbl
#< ${DBL_DIR}/device2_postIocInit.dbl
< ${DBL_DIR}/device3_postIocInit.dbl
< ${DBL_DIR}/autosave_postIocInit.dbl


You can push this to the extreme as include files can also include other include files.
As such you can drastically change your IOC with just a few well placed # signs.

Here I run the code with only device1 and device3 and generate the req autosave file
Then in a flash I reconfigure my IOC to run with that req file.

In practice I generate a autosave file for each of my devices/drivers
so that an autosave file for device1 and device3 is actually 2 autosave files.
In other words, my autosave files become 'atomic', i.e it doesn't make sense to break them into smaller units.

> 2) If you already have autosave-request files for all the databases you will load, is there a way automatically to invoke
> autosave create_xxx_set() commands for each of those request files?
>
> Sort of. If you have the PVs that are to be restored listed in info nodes in the database, and if the names of

Under **certain** conditions, you may be able to do something like this
dbgrep DEVICE_1_PREFIX*O > file1.req   ( <-- O is the suffix for PVs to autosave)
dbgrep DEVICE_3_PREFIX*O > file3.req
If required, you may use PV aliases or create PV that point to important fields. But with the appropriate naming and design convention, you will not have conformity issues.

Then in the respective deviceX_postIocInit include you simply read the file1.sav and file3.sav

--
Emmanuel