Re: How to get a list of all available PVs

[Ralph Lange <Ralph.Lange@gmx.de>]

On 17.12.2012 14:52, michael.abbott@diamond.ac.uk wrote:
> [...]
> One or the other, I've not looked to see what would be involved (well, I have now...).  I'd start by thinking of providing a simple socket interface which walks the database, or maybe just returns the results of dbgrep.
>
> Actually, a glance at the implementation of dbgrep (src/db/dbTest.c) suggests that the existing code is close to what you need, but needs a tweak (rather than calling puts you'll want more control over where the strings go), but it looks to me as if all the functions called by dbgrep are exported by epics, so writing what you need should be exceptionally easy: just grab a copy of dbgrep, give it a file handle output, replace puts, wrap a socket interface around it, launch it as part of your IOC startup scripts.
>
> If it were me, I'd dedicate a socket, read one line from the input, treat it as input to the modified dbgrep, send the results in response, close the socket.  Then `echo \* | nc $IOC $PORT` would give you a list of all PVs exported by the IOC.
>
> Of course, you'll need to add this code to every IOC...

You could also create a device support for the waveform record, that (at
boot time) creates an array (of char) containing all records' names.
Then a client can simply use CA to get the complete list from an IOC,
and there is no runtime overhead on the IOC. (Usually the client will be
faster at doing wildcard matches anyway.)

~Ralph