Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Fri, 31 Aug 2018 18:10:01 -0500

Hi Ben,

On 08/29/2018 07:59 AM, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> I am trying to upgrade an application to base-7 and getting these errors
> from dbExpand.pl. In base-3.14 it is allowed to set record fields to the
> empty string. Is this a bug or was it intentionally made illegal to set
> numeric fields to ''?

In Base-3.14 and earlier, dbExpand was a C program that used
dbStaticLib's host implementation. As such it stored field values as raw
strings without trying to interpret their values (other than expanding
macros that it had values for). It just does a syntax-check of whatever
you feed into it, and then spits out everything that it read in as a
single file/stream. If you feed it both a DBD and a DB file, the output
will contain a combination of the two.

Base-3.15 and 3.16 don't have a dbExpand program, but they do have a
dbdExpand.pl script which is used for expanding include statements in
DBD files. This script doesn't understand record instances at all.

Base-7.0 still has the dbdExpand.pl script, but also has a dbExpand.pl
script which reads in one or more DBD and DB files, expands any include
statements and macros, and spits out just the record instances. While
parsing the DB files it checks the field values against the specific
data type of that field, and these checks must be what is triggering
your errors.

The IOC's numeric parsing code has changed since 3.14, but we still
treat an empty string as the value zero, so my checks should really
permit that. If you want to try and fix them yourself look at the
    modules/database/src/tools/DBD/Recfield.pm
Perl module, and the legal_value() subroutines. Inserting
    $value eq '' or
at the beginning of the return statements for each of the numeric types
is probably all that is needed. You could also add tests to the
    modules/database/test/tools/Recfield.plt
program to double-check and prevent future regressions.

It might take me a while to work on this, so if you can find the time
I'd be happy to accept a patch or a merge request.

- Andrew

-- 
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System