Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Jack Harper - UKRI STFC via Tech-talk <[email protected]> · Fri, 1 Mar 2019 09:06:47 +0000

Hi Andrew,

Many thanks for the help.

Jack

________________________________
From: Johnson, Andrew N. <[email protected]>
Sent: 28 February 2019 17:19:58
To: Harper, Jack (STFC,RAL,ISIS); [email protected]
Subject: Re: timeStamp in pvget request not populated when using display field in v3 IOC

Hi Jack,

On 2/28/19 8:43 AM, Jack Harper - UKRI STFC via Tech-talk wrote:
> I have been using pvget as well as the CPP API to attempt to set up a request for a v3 IOC that populates the timeStamp and display.units fields. For some reason, whenever i use anything from display, it stops timeStamp from being populated. I know the PVRequest is order-dependent, so I have tried moving the order of the fields around, but this doesn't help. I think this may be a bug, I am not sure if it affects V4 IOCs but i'd imagine someone would have flagged it up earlier if so.
The CA provider by definition uses the Channel Access network protocol
for data transport, thus it can only fetch channel data using the data
structures that CA supports. CA was designed in the days of limited
network bandwidth and the thinking was that display fields change very
rarely, whereas value, timestamp and alarm data need to be transported
frequently so should use a minimal data structure.

There is no single CA data type that provides the timestamp plus the
display metadata that you requesting, so the CA provider can't fulfil
your request in a single get operation. Instead of pretending that it
can and doing two separate CA gets from the channel with two different
data types (which would not be atomic), it just returns a subset of the
fields you asked for. I suggest you do one get to fetch the units
string, then another for the value, alarm and timestamp.

The pva provider is capable of getting any combination of fields that
you request, as long as your IOC is running a pvAccess server obviously.

Please note that your distinction between v3 and v4 IOCs doesn't really
exist; a v4 IOC is just a v3 IOC that is also running a pvAccess server,
either QSRV or the older pvaSrv. However you can add pvaSrv to a 3.14
IOC, or build EPICS 7 IOCs without the pvAccess server, so I using the
terms v3 or v4 for IOCs could be confusing.

HTH,

- Andrew

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System