Visual DCTs Latest Hits

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Visual DCTs Latest Hits

• Jaka Bobnar (jaka.bobnar_at_cosylab.com),
• Matej Sekoranja, Igor Verstovsek

Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia Work in part funded
by Diamond (DLS)
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Contents

• VisualDCT and EPICS
• Why using VisualDCT?
• Latest features and improvements
• Alarm Handler plug-in
• Channel Archiver plug-in
• Spreadsheet view and editor
• Substitutions file editor
• Conclusion

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EPICS

• Experimental Physics and Industrial Control
  System
• requires specific configuration files
• record instance database files
• additional EPICS extensions configuration files
• configuration files are text-based

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What is Visual DCT?

• Visual Database Configuration Tool for EPICS
• Written in Java
• Platform independent
• Webstart support
• Open-source product

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Why using VisualDCT

• Talks 100 EPICS
• no additional files
• preserves order, comments
• Hierarchical support
• Standard IDE features
• clipboard, undo
• object inspector, visual linking
• Plug-ins
• freely extensible
• Easy and fun to use

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Latest features

• Visual and functionality improvements
• zoom
• printing
• visual cues for different actions
• improved building
• bugfixes, etc.
• Plug-ins
• See next slides

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Alarm Handler Configuration Plug-in (1)

• Alarm Handler displays EPICS alarm status
• Uses text based configurations files
• difficult to maintain if database is large
• hierarchical or flat
• Solution a generic tool, which generates
  configurations files

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Alarm Handler Configuration Plug-in (2)

• Record names are imported from VisualDCT template
• Displays the file structure as a tree
• Edit the tree to change values of properties
• DragDrop supported
• Automatic file consistency checking

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Channel Archiver Configuration Plug-in

• Channel Archiver is an archiving toolset for
  EPICS
• Requires xml configuration file
• Hard to maintain if database is large
• Includes all Alarm Handler plug-in features
• Future plans
• include possibility to use a substitutions file

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Spreadsheet View and Editor

• Graphical representation is useless when database
  is large
• A new view was proposed spreadsheet style
• Records presented in an editable table
• Enables editing multiple records simultaneously
• Easy database error tracking

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Substitutions File Editor

• EPICS database mechanism requires two input file
• .template
• .substitutions
• Substitutions files with many macros are hard to
  maintain as a text file
• Plug-in will offer syntax checks of the
  substitutions files
• Large amount of macros will be easier to control

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Conclusions

• EPICS gained a powerful database development tool
• Editing databases can be fun
• VisualDCT will be supported in the future and
  will follow EPICS changes
• Work in progress with Nick Rees
• Check out http//visualdct.cosylab.com