Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Baker, KA \(Keith\)" <[email protected]> · Tue, 15 Feb 2005 11:13:25 -0000

Hi,
At DLS we have been dabbling with Velocity. This provided a limited but
reasonably easy to use scripting language to take away some of the
tediously repetitive jobs when drawing a large EDM panel.
Typically we feed it a list of record (or PV) names and a partial EDM
file, which may contain a line of widgets that you want repeated for
each record. Within the EDM file you can embed Velocity commands to
perhaps loop round the set of widgets substituting in the next PV from
the list and incrementing the X or Y offset.
This saves editing each widget in EDM and makes any global changes very
easy, e.g. if you wanted to change a colour or change the size of a load
of buttons, you can just manually change one value in an input file and
regenerate the edl file. Of course you can manually edit the edl text
file or even write scripts to modify the edl file anyway but these would
take longer to do.
Velocity is Java based so can be extended. I've recently been inputting
a 2D table rather than a simple 1D list.
The down side is that if you make complicated changes to the original
EDM file you may no longer be able to edit it again in EDM, perhaps to
add another widget. The Velocity commands appear as comments in the file
so not too bad but the variable names will be unexpanded. If you have a
variable for instance for the XOffset EDM will fail. Some manual hacking
can help but may defeat the purpose.
You tend to find the original edl files and Velocity commands are
application specific. We're a very long way from a totally generic tool,
but it would be possible.

Let me know if you want any more details. We're not exactly generating
EDM files from scratch, so it may not be what you're looking for.

Regards,
Keith Baker
Diamond Control System
[email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Terry Carlino
Sent: 11 February 2005 15:07
To: tech_talk
Subject: Re: edm

Rolf Keitel wrote:

> Has anybody developed a tool or library, which generates .edl files 
> for edm?
> - rolf -
>
I am in the early stages of developing a C++ library which will generate

.edl files. It's not even in early alpha yet (which basically means I 
don't have a working copy) but I expect to have something working soon.

Terry Carlino
TJNAF
[email protected]

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System