RE: EPICS database Feature request

["Mooney, Tim M." <mooney@aps.anl.gov>]

Well, since we're talking about 3.15, we could require <record>.dbd to define an initial value for DTYP.
Then dbst wouldn't have to worry about it.
Tim Mooney
________________________________________
From: tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov [tech-talk-bounces@aps.anl.gov] on behalf of Benjamin Franksen [benjamin.franksen@helmholtz-berlin.de]
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2014 8:13 AM
To: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: EPICS database Feature request

On Friday, June 06, 2014 13:12:08 Andrew Johnson wrote:
> On 06/06/2014 11:49 AM, Emmanuel Mayssat wrote:
> > My goal is also to have this feature supported and be part of the
> > epics-base.
> > The feature I am asking for is very close to what the alias
> > directive is doing.
>
> Something like this could be added (in 3.15 or later, not 3.14 which
> is now feature-frozen) quite easily. It would have to re-use the
> existing syntax for setting field values though, say allowing a "*"
> meaning "whatever" for the record type name when the record must
> already exist:
>
> record("*", "myAO") {
>    field(VAL, "21")
>    field(FLNK, "AnotherAO.PROC")
> }

Yes, that sound like a nice feature. I agree that it is much better to
throw an error when the record does not yet exist.

Another problem when overriding record fields in this way is the DTYP
field, and primarily if you use dbst on the template/db files. I
remember that dbst likes to substitute "Soft Channel" for "", which will
break the existing record if its DTYP is different from that. It would
be nice if someone had an idea how to prevent that.

Cheers
Ben
--
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams