Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

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<== Date ==>		<== Thread ==>

Subject:	Re: get the timestamp of a record as a human-readable string and restore it after rebooting
From:	"Hu, Yong via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
To:	"Mooney, Tim M." <mooney at anl.gov>, "tech-talk at aps.anl.gov" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Date:	Wed, 19 Aug 2020 01:59:37 +0000

Hi Tim,

1) Yes, you are right. It is a typo. It should be “A” instead of “1”;

2) I always have the habit of using PINI=YES in records to avoid the “UDF”. After removing the PINI, the string value is indeed restored although I get something like this when I use caget -a recordB.

$ caget recordB

recordB 2020-08-18 08:14:40.958718535

$ caget -a recordB

recordB <undefined> 2020-08-18 08:14:40.958718535 UDF NO_ALARM

Removing PINI works although the output “caget -a” seems unusual.

Thanks,

Yong

From: "Mooney, Tim M." <mooney at anl.gov>
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 8:33 PM
To: "tech-talk at aps.anl.gov" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>, "Hu, Yong" <yhu at bnl.gov>
Subject: Re: get the timestamp of a record as a human-readable string and restore it after rebooting

Hi Yong,

Two things:

I think there might be a typo. The calc _expression_ "1" doesn't do what you say you want the calcout record to do.
I don't see why you use PINI to process the stringin record, if you want it to have the timestamp of the last time recordA made a transition to 0. If you remove the PINI setting, what is the value of the stringin record immediately after rebooting?

Tim Mooney (mooney at anl.gov) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls Group (www.aps.anl.gov)
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of Hu, Yong via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 6:00 PM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: get the timestamp of a record as a human-readable string and restore it after rebooting

Hello everyone,

Since the field .TIME is internal to a record (e.g. recordA), it seems not straightforward for a string record (e.g. recordB) to directly get the timestamp of recordA as a human-readable string, although it is straightforward for a Python program to put a record’s timestamp as a string.

I managed to use “Soft Timestamp” together with “TSEL” to get the timestamp of a not-on-the-same-IOC record as a human-readable string. See below:

record(calcout,"recordA -Calc_") {

field(INPA,"recordA CP")

field(CALC,"1")

field(OOPT,"Transition To Zero")

field(OUT, "recordB.PROC")

}

record(stringin, "recordB")

{

field(DTYP,"Soft Timestamp")

field(PINI,"YES")

#without TSEL, recordB will not be exactly the same as recordA’s timestamp

field(TSEL,"recordA.TIME")

field(INP, "@%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f")

info(autosaveFields_pass0, "VAL")

}

recordA is a bi record running on another IOC (that is why I use CP in INPA). I want to use recordB to latch the timestamp of recordA when recordA’s value goes from 1 to 0. Everything seems working as expected. However, there is one problem with autosave. After the IOC is rebooted, the value of recordB is <undefined>, it is not restored to its saved value although I see the saved value “2020-08-15 01:18:55.236900451” in the *_pass0.sav file before I reboot the IOC. I also tried to use pass1, the same result <undefined>.

$ caget -a recordB

recordB <undefined> <undefined>

I see some errors during the rebooting. I guess the reason why I get “dbGetTimeStamp failed” is that the CA link is not established yet before initial process (PINI=YES). However, when I look through the code https://github.com/epics-base/epics-base/blob/3.15/src/ioc/misc/iocInit.c, dbCaLinkInit() is indeed before initialProcess().

reboot_restore: entry for file 'settings_pass0.sav'

reboot_restore: Found filename 'settings_pass0.sav' in restoreFileList.

*** restoring from './as/save/settings_pass0.sav' at initHookState 6 (before record/device init) ***

reboot_restore: done with file 'settings_pass0.sav'

recGblGetTimeStamp: dbGetTimeStamp failed, recordB.TSEL = recordA

How do I solve this problem? Any suggestions are appreciated!

I am using Base-3.15.6-2 and autosave-5.9 if versions matter.

Thanks,

Yong Hu