Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Mark Rivers <[email protected]> · Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:02:10 +0000

Folks,

I have made 2 recent improvements to the ezcaIDL extension, which interfaces IDL and EPICS CA.

1) An alternative mechanism to the EZCA_IDL_SHARE environment variable for locating the shareable library (DLL or .so file) at run time.  This makes it much easier to switch between using 32-bit and 64-bit IDL.

This is from extensions/src/ezcaIDL/README:

**************************************************
IDL finds the shareable library at run time by one of two mechanisms.

1) First, it looks for the environment variable EZCA_IDL_SHARE.  If this environment
variable exists it must point to the complete path to ezcaIDL.dll (Windows) or
libezcaIDL.so (all other architectures).  For example:

setenv EZCA_IDL_SHARE /usr/local/lib/libezcaIDL.so

2) If the shareable library is not found from the EZCA_IDL_SHARE environment variable
then it is searched for in the !IDL_PATH.  The file name searched for is the
following:

base_!VERSION.OS_!VERSION.ARCH

base is either ezcaIDL.dll (Windows) or libezcaIDL.so (all other architectures). 
!VERSION.OS can be "linux", "Win32", etc.  !VERSION.ARCH can be "x86", "x86_64", etc. 
Do "help, /structure, !VERSION" in IDL to see the values for your system.

This mechanism can be more convenient than using EZCA_IDL_SHARE because it allows
easy switching between 32 and 64 bit versions of IDL, and does not require setting an
environment variable.  It does require either copying and renaming the files to a
location in the !IDL_PATH, or creating soft links in the !IDL_PATH to point to the
locations of the actual shareable libraries.
**************************************************

2) Increase the maximum PV name length from 40 to 128.  EPICS CA should now be the limit, not ezcaIDL.

The latest version can be found here:

http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/download/extensions/ezcaIDL_20121212.tar.gz

Cheers,
Mark

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System