RE: Autosave ignores PVs starting with some characters

["Mooney, Tim M." <mooney@aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the patch.  I'm fine with recognizing PV names that begin with an underscore, but it doesn't feel like a very good idea to let some of those other characters begin valid lines in an autosave request file.  It's not my job to decide what are valid first characters for PV names, and I don't know of any rule other than the list of valid characters you noted.  Maybe we should decide this on purpose, rather than by default.

Does anyone have concerns about parsing PV names that might motivate restricting the first character more tightly than the other characters?

Tim Mooney (mooney@aps.anl.gov) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls Group (www.aps.anl.gov)
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab


________________________________________
From: Konrad, Martin [konrad@frib.msu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2016 4:09 PM
To: Mooney, Tim M.; EPICS Tech Talk
Subject: Autosave ignores PVs starting with some characters

Hi Tim,
I recently came across the following issue with Autosave: PV names
starting with '_' did not get saved. Comparing the source code with the
list of allowed characters (see chapter 6.3 General Rules for Database
Definition of the Application Developers Manual) revealed that all PVs
starting with one of the following characters will not be saved:

'_', '-', ':', '.', '[', ']', '<', '>', ';'

They make it into the automatically generated .req file but not into the
.sav file. The attached patch fixes the problem for me.

Thanks!

Martin

--
Martin Konrad
Control System Engineer
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
Michigan State University
640 South Shaw Lane
East Lansing, MI 48824-1321, USA
Tel. 517-908-7253
Email: konrad@frib.msu.edu