Re: dbreport or similar?

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

Hi Steve,

On 04/21/2017 09:07 AM, Steve Kinder wrote:
> Does dbreport still exist or anything similar to parse a database and
> list say record names, desc fields etc to a text and/or html file?

The tricky thing about "parsing a database" is that the majority of IOC
database files are loaded using macro substitution parameters, and you
would need to pass exactly the same sets of macros into such a parser to
get the same list of database records and field values out as the IOC,
given the same input files.

Any modern scripting language should be able to extract record names and
field values out of a DB file if you're OK with being fairly simplistic
about it though (i.e. you don't care about expanding macros or include
statements, or about checking record types and field values against the
IOC's DBD file). The syntax is described in the Application Developers
Guide Chapter 6 (Database Definition).

However if you need to know the values of fields that are unset (i.e.
get the default value for that record type) you will have to parse and
understand the IOC's DBD file as well, which is rather more complex. I
have some unreleased Perl code which can help with doing the latter
(derived from the DBD file parser that comes with Base-3.15.x) although
it would need some work to extract and generate the output you're
looking for (for reasonably experienced Perl programmers only though).

You could also write your own C program that uses the dbStatic library
from Base to generate what you're after, which will similarly need to
load the IOC's DBD file as well as the DB file(s) you want to extract
data from. There are a couple of examples showing how to do this here:

http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/base/R3-14/12-docs/AppDevGuide/node15.html#SECTION0015160000000000000000
Note however that the dbStatic APIs are no longer supported for host
tools in Base-3.15 and later, so this isn't a recommended approach.

HTH,

- Andrew

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