Structured PVs archiving and archived data retrieval problem

[Aleš Kete via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hello everyone,

(I am pretty new to EPICS software ecosystem and am trying to learn about typical workflows for acquiring and archiving data through EPICS.)

To start, I have two questions:

* How complete is support for structured PVs in EPICS archiver appliance and aaclient tools (more details below)?

* Is there (also some other) standard tool for archiving EPICS data?

Some context from which the questions arose:

We are  working on custom record type support for PVs providing multi-channel signal acquisitions, we added support (via qsrv / qsrv2) for obtaining data through PV structured according to epics:nt/NTTable:1.0 specification.
Same behavior was observer, however, using "Tbl" PV from pva2pva's iocimagedemo.

We have trouble using EPICS Archiver (https://github.com/archiver-appliance/epicsarchiverap, v2.0.7, deployed using Docker singletomcat image): despite data being archived, it cannot be  viewed using built-in viewer, nor can we retrieve data using aaclient tools (v0.0.3, https://github.com/mdavidsaver/aaclient) - segfault occurs.

$ aaget ioc7:signals:dod:pva
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

$ aah5 test.h5 ioc7:signals:dod:pva
INFO:aaclient.cmd.h5:Writing /home/ales/test.h5
free(): corrupted unsorted chunks
Aborted (core dumped)

From PV details page in EPICS Archiver appliance:

Archiver DBR type (from typeinfo): DBR_V4_GENERIC_BYTES

Archiver DBR type (initial) DBR_V4_GENERIC_BYTES

Is this a scalar: Yes

Number of elements: 1

Data can be retrieved using PVA CLI tools, pvaPy and p4p.

$ pvinfo ioc7:signals:dod:pva
ioc7:signals:dod:pva
Server: 10.0.6.13:5075
Type:
    epics:nt/NTTable:1.0
        structure record
            structure _options
                int queueSize
                boolean atomic
        alarm_t alarm
            int severity
            int status
            string message
        time_t timeStamp
            long secondsPastEpoch
            int nanoseconds
            int userTag
        string[] labels
        structure value
            short[] A
            short[] B
            short[] C
            short[] D

$ pvget ioc7:signals:dod:pva
ioc7:signals:dod:pva 2025-03-14 10:17:41.584    
  A  B   C   D
108  9 118 102
108 10 119 102
111 11 121 105
108  9 119 102
104  6 115  98
106  7 116  99
108  9 119 102
...

>>> from p4p.client.thread import Context
>>> ctxt = Context('pva')
>>> sub = ctxt.monitor('ioc7:signals:dod:pva', lambda pv: print(pv.value['A'][1:5]))
>>> [109 110 109 106]
[109 108 105 108]
[105 108 111 106]
[110 108 104 105]
[109 107 107 112]
[106 102 110 112]
[105 109 110 105]
...
>>> sub = c.close()
...

Any information or directions for continuing will be appreciated,

BR, Ales