Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Chip WATSON <[email protected]> · Tue, 23 Jun 1998 08:25:53 +0200

Ned Arnold wrote:

> > Is there a way to specify (in the record's PRECision field) to direct a medm
> > text monitor to fill the displayed VALue with leading zeros?  I want the
> > display to show '02',  not '2'.   In a printf statement the syntax would be
> > %02d.
> >
> > -ps
> >
> >
>
> No, not directly. If its REAL important you could write a simple device
> support routine for a stringin record that puts it into whatever format
> you want. The stringin record could fetch the value you want using the
> .INP field.
>
>         Ned

There was a discussion at the SOSH 98 workshop at SLS resulting
in an agreement to standardize on a thing called "format" which
would be the same as a printf string for a single number. The context
was in device oriented API's, where access is to a named device with
a named property (deviceName + property == channel). Properties
then have "characteristics" like units, resolution, etc., and one of these
characteristics would be "format".

I don't yet know how we'll put this into CDEV and how we would then
map it to EPICS, but one possibility would be a new string field or
special method in the IOC. An alternate approach (for CDEV) would be
to  keep this information in a host resident database (transparent to
applications such as MEDM running on CDEV). This second approach
has already been demonstrated with CDEV by a group at CERN (and
perhaps also at BNL, I can't remember).

Chip

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System