Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

• You lose the ability to use macro substitution on the IOC. (Which your mail is about.)
• The process can be slow, as the template database is re-read from the file system for every instance. If the IOC uses remote shell or ftp access, this adds up to half a second or so for every instance. If you break things down to e.g. each single error bit being an instance of a template database, this can easily add up to minutes. (That's where we changed plans...)
  

   dbLoadRecord(file.db,"deviceName=toto")

All, 
Most of you must be familiar with dbLoadRecord and dbLoadTemplate.
I like the first one because you can pass parameters which are not
necessarily hard coded (i.e. you can use the same db file for different
instances).

epicsEnvSet(DEVN,"toto")
dbLoadRecord(file.db,"deviceName=$(DEVN)")

I like the dbLoadTemplate because of the clarity, but then for each
device instantiation you need to create a complete substitution file.

Is there a way to do something like this:
dbLoadTemplate(file.sub,"deviceName=$(DEVN)")
Where the db files is generated and then parsed once again with macro
provided in command line?