Re: Initializing a record VAL field with a constant

[Marty Kraimer <mrk@aps.anl.gov>]

J. Frederick Bartlett wrote:

>  Recently I was adding some new records to our name/value server IOC and I
> noticed an unexpected behavior. My new records, which are of type longin and
> ai, are used to supply system-wide values, i.e. firmware version numbers for
> comparison with hardware, computational constants, etc., for the rest of the
> control system. The records are initialized by placing a constant value in
> the INP field of the record definition text.
>
>  As one would expect, after initialization the UDF field for these records
> is zero, indicating that the VAL field has had a value assigned at some
> point in the record's existence. What I did not expect was that the SEVR
> field is set to INVALID and the STAT field to UDF. I would have expected
> that, if you are going to bother to set the UDF field to zero, consistency
> would dictate that the SEVR and STAT fields would be given the value
> NO_ALARM, just as it would be when the VAL field is set by a CA put
> operation. Is this behavior intentional and, if so, why?
>
>  I also discovered that, for the stringin record, this technique of setting
> an initial value by placing a constant -- in this case a string constant --
> in the INP field does not work at all. Is there a corresponding method for
> initializing the VAL field of a stringin record?

Just initialize the VAL field directly. Also specify PINI.


record(stringin,"mrkstring") {
        field(VAL,"test string")
        field(PINI,"YES")
}

This works with current releases. I am not sure about 3.14.4

Marty