Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:39:49 -0500

Hi Dehong,

On 10/26/2013 11:35 AM, Zhang, Dehong wrote:

I am trying to fetch the value from a PV in another IOC.  I would like to get the connection
status and alarm severity in one call.  According to the developer's guide, these can be done
by setting the options (3.14.12), but whenever I set the options to none-zero (with the proper
return structure), it fails.

I did a "grep dbGetLink *" in base/***/src/rec.  It seems nobody uses options.

You are correct for that API, DB links do support options but CA links

and CONST links don't (if you pass in a non-zero pointer for poptions

they will set *poptions=0 before returning to tell you that they don't

support any option bits). In 3.15 if you try and pass a non-zero value

at *options you'll get a warning message at runtime (and the value will

be zeroed again).

Do I need to explicitly call dbCaGetLink, and check the link status and alarm severity by
calling dbCaIsLinkConnected and dbCaGetSevr?

I would advise against using the dbCa routines directly if you can avoid

doing so, they will lock your code into using Channel Access when future

releases may provide pvAccess links too.

For the link connection status, call dbIsLinkConnected(plink) which

returns a true/false value.

The dbGetLink() routine automatically sets the alarm condition (status

and severity) of the record that owns the link, based on the link flags

and the alarm condition of the link target. What else were you planning

to do with the that alarm information?

By the way, dbGetLink always returns "0", even when it fails or when the link is not there.

A disconnected link is not seen as an error, the IOC code should be able

to continue despite another part of the control system being down. The

dbGetLink() routine can return a non-zero status, but disconnection does

not cause it to do that.

Note that in 3.15 and later we have been changing the implementation of

the link code to allow additional link types to be added in the future,

although we're not at that stage yet.

HTH,

- Andrew
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System