Re: Accessing Date and Time information

[Andrew Johnson <anj@aps.anl.gov>]

Hi David,

David Dudley wrote:
> Is there a method that allows access of Date and Time information from
> inside the database?
>
> I need to set the clocks on some remote devices, and they are all
> attached through Modbus.  I need to preset a set of registers and then
> trigger a 'load' command on the remote.

Yes, there's a stringin device support delivered as part of Base since 
R3.14.5 that you can give an strftime string to.  Eg:

record(stringin, "$(user)now")
{
    field(DESC, "Current time and date")
    field(DTYP, "Soft Timestamp")
    field(INP, "@%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%03f")
}

If you need the fields as integers rather than strings you can use one 
stringin record per field and rely on the numeric conversions built into 
the database links to convert the VAL field of each record into the 
appropriate integer -- not wildly efficient, but functional.

- Andrew
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