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<== Date ==> <== Thread ==>

Subject: RE: Text in EDM
From: "Sinclair, John William" <[email protected]>
To: Andrew Johnson <[email protected]>, Michael Johnson <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:02:04 -0400
Michael,

My first thought is maybe edm isn't the correct tool for this application. If you have a mandate to integrate this information with edm then I can give some quick suggestions although it would be good to have a more precise set of requirements.

First, note that the text display/entry widgets that I wrote (named text monitor and text control) have an artificially imposed limit for string length of 255 characters.

Steve Singleton of Diamond ([email protected]) created the following widgets:
  - Multi-line Text Update
 - Multi-line Text Entry

There is a table widget that can read comma-separated input from a file and display (no edit) a table of information.

You can build screens "on the fly", in a manner similar to something like php in a web browser. So, for example, various actions are normally be associated with opening a related display. Depending on the file extension to be opened, edm can be configured to execute a script instead. The script presumably could obtain information from the external facility and transform it to content that conforms to the structure of a edl file. This output is received and rendered by edm as if it came from an edl file.

Other suggestions that might be a bit more difficult to implement:
  - write a custom edm widget
  - convert part of your system to CSS using BOY as the display manager

Best,
John Sinclair

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andrew Johnson
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 12:28 PM
To: Michael Johnson
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Text in EDM

Hi Michael,

On 09/30/2013 10:54 AM, Michael Johnson wrote:
>
> We have a new unix-side process at JLab with some interesting 
> knowledge, and we want to push this knowledge out to an interface. 
> There will be a lot of text and long lists - way past the EPICS String 
> record 40-character limit.
>
> Please offer any advice or pointers you have:
>
> 1) What EDM widgets are favored for this kind of large text output?
>
> 2) How does one push data to EDM when PVs do not fit requirements? 
> File I/O? IPC?

I believe all EPICS OPIs now support long strings, which are just character arrays containing text (which in most cases should be nil-terminated, but the client must not assume that).  MEDM and EDM certainly allow you to point a text widget to a waveform record or other array field (the aSub record is also good for this) that is configured to hold CHARs.  In the case of MEDM you do have to configure the widget display Format to "string", I'm not sure about EDM.  Note that the caput/caget/camonitor programs that come with base support long strings with a -S option.

I can't tell you how the widget actually interprets the text, hopefully EDM supports wrapping and line breaks, but I have no idea if it actually does (I don't think MEDM can but I haven't tried it).  It would seem like someone might even be able to write a widget that could handle a pluggable formatter to accept Markdown or even HTML, but I'm not sure if it would really be worth doing that.

HTH,

- Andrew
-- 
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human
intelligence long enough to get money from it. -- Stephen Leacock


Replies:
Re: Text in EDM Rolf Keitel
References:
Text in EDM Michael Johnson
Re: Text in EDM Andrew Johnson

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