Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]> · Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:27:50 +0200

Jeff,
Unfortunately I don't understand your reply.
Jeff Hill wrote:

Dirk,
The following is probably occurring.
o the ca service (the gateway) has a PV who's native type is advertised
to be enumerated (i.e. menu)

Shouldn't that be:
the *ioc* has a pv who's native type is advertised to be enumerated
o the ca server is fetching the enumerated state set string table
application type from the ca service (the gateway). That typically
occurs when the ca server attaches to an enumerated pv and it needs
to initialize its cache for the enumerated state set string table.

And this:

the ca *client* is fetching the enumerated state set string table
application type from the gateway. That typically occurs when the ca
*client* attaches to an enumerated pv...
o the ca service (the gateway) is providing a response data type which
	does not have a GDD primitive type that is (scalar or array of)
	string.

I completely don't understand this sentence. The gateway fetches the
native type from the ioc and provides a string or a number depending on
the request type of the client, right?
o this is not a useful response for the server so it is printing a
	(could be easier to understand) message

In the context where the message is printed, neither the PV name nor the
contents of the string or enum table seem to be known. Furthermore the
function returns void and does not trow exceptions. Thus the caller who
might have these information cannot know about any problems and cannot
provide a useful context.
o once this happens I doubt that the server will successfully provide
	the enumerated string table meta data to its clients
I have no idea what the client actually requested. I also don't know who
the client is or which PV is affected. All useful context information is
missing.
The message from the portable server could use some work so I created bug id
638288 at the launchpad EPICS site.
The root cause of this situation is possibly an issue in the EPICS gateway.

I think first an improvement in cas and gdd is necessary to allow to
track down any potential bug in the gateway.
I must admit that I don’t know at the moment where one would properly enter

a bug
against the EPICS gateway; probably the Mantis maintained bug tracker

entries for
the EPICS gateway on the EPICS site are now deprecated?
Jeff
______________________________________________________
Jeffrey O. Hill           Email        [email protected]
LANL MS H820              Voice        505 665 1831
Los Alamos NM 87545 USA   FAX          505 665 5107
Message content: TSPA
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]

On

Behalf Of Dirk Zimoch
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 3:02 AM
To: EPICS
Subject: Strange gateway error message
Hi all, (Jeff in particular)
Sometime I see in the CA gateway log file entries like this:
filename="../../../../src/cas/generic/casPVI.cc" line number=251
Bad data type application type "enums" string conversion table for
enumerated PV isnt a string type?
Can anyone tell me what this means? Unfortunately it does not print any
context like PV name or involved enum strings. So the problem is quite
hard to debug.
The message comes from
void casPVI::updateEnumStringTableAsyncCompletion(const gdd & resp)
I suspect this may happen when the enum string set has been modified on
the IOC while the channel is connected though the gateway.
Dirk

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System