Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Marty Kraimer <[email protected]> · Tue, 03 Feb 1998 11:24:55 -0600

There seemed to be a consensus that it is a good idea to have a field
VERS in each record. There was no consensus about how this field is
given a value. The only ways I see that are easy to implement are:

1) Give an initial value in the .dbd file
2) make the developer give a value via the init routine of the record
support module.

I originally suggested 1) but have changed my mind. Either it is done
automatically or the developer has to remember to change the .dbd file
when any change is made in the record support module. In spite of some
suggestions I dont see an easy way to do it automatically. Note that
version should change ONLY when the .dbd file or record support module
are changed. The developer is likely to forget to change the .dbd file
when only the record support module is changed. Thus I vote for 2).

This means that we could put something like

field(VERS,DBF_STRING) {
    prompt("Version Number") 
    special(SPC_NOMOD)
    size(40)
}

This could go into dbCommon

Then a record support init_record routine could contain:

    strcpy(precord.vers,"xxx.yy");

Questions:
1) Should the field type be DBF_STRING?
2) Should there be rules about how version numbers are assigned?
3) What about all the existing record support modules?

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System