RE: Scan Time Definitions

["Allison, Stephanie" <saa@slac.stanford.edu>]

Hi David,

> Do scan times always have to be specified in seconds?

Yes, at least in 3.14.8.2.

> I've got some fields that only need to be scanned once a minute, once
> an hour, once every 4 hours, once every 12 hours, and once 
> each night at
> midnite (actually, 24 hours from the last scan).
> 
> These are for compliance reporting information, the information comes
> from remote sites, and it takes some time (a minute or so) to get each
> of the hourly readings.  I'd rather not scan these when I 
> don't have to,
> and it would make more sense to admin if I could say "I scan this once
> every 4 hours" instead of "I scan this once every 14,400 seconds".

If there are only a few PVs like this, you can add a raw soft mbbo record on top of the SCAN field of those PVs that have the nice names but writes the proper value into the SCAN field.  Or if it's just a matter of displaying the SCAN rate, you should be able to use raw soft mbbi's that feed from SCAN and show the nice name.  But the mbbo/mbbi's have to change when you change menuScan.dbd which hopefully isn't very often...

Stephanie