Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Kasemir, Kay via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:10:19 +0000

> ... I couldn’t find any pre-existing solution to converting alh config files to the phoebs/css xml format.
> ... Do you have scripts that build one xml file from fragments ...

The phoebus alarm server uses the same XML configuration file format as the earlier, Eclipse-based implementation.
The latter's AlarmConfigTool included an option to read the alh file format, see https://github.com/ControlSystemStudio/cs-studio/blob/master/applications/alarm/alarm-plugins/org.csstudio.alarm.beast.configtool/scripts/convert_alh.sh
I didn't have an operational motivation to port it to the phoebus code base, since I've personally never used it at our site.
Reasons:
The conversion from a basic ALH hierarchy of PVs into the XML format is pretty easy, you can do that with a python script in a day (and if you do, please email the result so I can add that to the new code base).
The real issue, however, is usually the conversion of related displays, where you need to for example convert some link that called a script for starting MEDM into the path to a converted display file. This is highly site-specific (and another reason for implementing the conversion tool in python so each site can easily adjust it to local needs).
Finally, the overall idea of the alarm system is not to add many PVs real fast, but instead spend some time on each alarm to come up with a good trigger PV, a useful guidance message, a suitable link to a related display and ideally another link to for example a web page that has more detail. See "Alarm Guidelines" on https://controlssoftware.sns.ornl.gov/training/2019_USPAS/ For us at the SNS that alone was enough reason to not simply import existing ALH config files but instead to start over with a new configuration. But again if you already have a perfect alarm configuration and would like to import, then I'd suggest implementing a python tool that converts the ALH config into the XML format which you can then import. Similarly, I use the export/import option of the alarm server to extract the config as XML for several purposes: Periodic backup, bulk update of for example telephone numbers, ..

Thanks,
Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System