Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Stainer Tom via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Tue, 27 Apr 2021 15:05:56 +0000

Thank you Kay and Michael for the help and advice. I had come across Channel Finder & recsync previously but I wasn't quite sure how it worked and what it did exactly (I was also unsure if it supported PVA, given the name).
Your responses have been very helpful.
I will look into the documentation and try it out.

Kind regards,
Tom

    Hi:

    > If I may continue with your analogy and the case of the web, then in this context there are web crawlers that exist for the sole purpose to index web sites and to see what is out there on the web (whether advertised or not).
    > Similarly, I would like to know how one would go about making such a crawler for PVA, which could or could not be used in combination with a central registry. 

    Right, I assume in the long run most sites come up with some way to catalog their PVs.
    One motivation: If a PV is online, you can use 'cainfo' to locate the associated IOC, then find the *.db file etc.
    But if a PV is simply disconnected, how do you figure out on what IOC it was supposed to be, so you can then debug the issue?
    Approaches can be as simple as adding "dbl >pv.list" to the end of the IOC startup script so you can later "grep" for record names.
    A tool that's used at several sites is the Channel Finder, http://channelfinder.github.io, which includes a "recsync" component via which IOCs publish all their record names.

    -Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System