Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Thu, 3 Mar 2005 12:42:08 +0100

On Wednesday 23 February 2005 19:18, you wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 February 2005 14:40, Marty Kraimer wrote:
> > Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> > >On Wednesday 16 February 2005 20:42, Marty Kraimer wrote:
> > >>If all that is desired to to make the record not be in alarm
> > >> after initialization then just set
> > >>
> > >>    field(SEVR,"NO_ALARM")
> > >>    field(STAT,"NO_ALARM")
> > >>    field(UDF,"0")
> > >>
> > >>In the record instance definition.
> > >
> > >However, at least with 3.13.9 this doesn't work. The record (a bo)
> > > is still UDF/INVALID after booting.
> > >
> > In both 3.13 and 3.14 dbCommon.dbd has the definitions:
> >
> >         field(STAT,DBF_MENU) {
> >                 prompt("Alarm Status")
> >                 special(SPC_NOMOD)
> >                 menu(menuAlarmStat)
> >                 initial("UDF")
> >         }
> >         field(SEVR,DBF_MENU) {
> >                 prompt("Alarm Severity")
> >                 special(SPC_NOMOD)
> >                 menu(menuAlarmSevr)
> >                 initial("INVALID")
> >         }
> >
> > Thus the defaults are STAT=UDF and SEVR=INVALID.
>
> Oops. I inferred what I said about the defaults from the output of
> dbst, which threw your STAT/SEVR definitions out of my db file.

And it did so because fields STAT and SEVR have no promptGroup 
attributes, thus are not recognized as DCT fields and thus get 
eliminated by dbDumpRecord from dbStaticLib. This routine has a 3rd 
argument 'level', which is documented as follows

 0 - write only prompt fields that are different from the default values
 1 - write only the fields which are prompt fields
 2 - write values of all fields

So there is no way to write all fields that that are different from the 
default values, regardless of whether they are prompt fields or not.

Note that dbst is used to eliminate default values from the db file, 
which is very useful for capfast generated db files. Thus, one cannot 
use level=2 to circumvent this problem.

There are two solutions:

(1) Add promptGroup attributes to the field definitions of STAT and 
SEVR, effectively making them into DCT fields.

(2) Split argument 'level' into two boolean arguments 
'non_prompt_fields' and 'non_default_fields'. Or add a 4th level

 3 - write values of all fields that are different from the default 
values

I prefer solution (1), because it's the least intrusive and easy to 
realize. I think we'll make this change locally.

Cheers,
Ben

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System