Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Márcio Paduan Donadio <[email protected]> · Wed, 29 Jul 2015 12:59:08 +0000

         Kasemir,

     thank you for your answer. Let me tell our story:

     We saw in CS-Studio a good opportunity to beamline's staff to build 
their own screens because of the user friendly interface. The problem is 
that beamline's staff are full of good idea and desires, but have poor 
programming skills. So, we prepared a 2 days course as they could start 
to use CS-Studio in a basic way. Even with few programming skills they 
could build beautiful and useful screens to use the IOCs we developed 
for them.

     For complex tasks we created a python framework called py4syn that 
they use in parallel with CS-Studio.

     The problem is that some of them adventure themselves to develop 
complex python scripts and embedded them in BOY widgets. The result is 
that sometimes CS-Studio freezes because of script issues and the 
biggest derived problem is that their wrong perception is that CS-Studio 
is not a good tool. This way, two of our beamlines decided to migrate to 
MEDM, even when we tried to show that the problem was not caused by the 
tool.

     For us in LNLS it is a good strategy to give some freedom to 
beamline's staff to build some pieces of software in the EPICS client 
layer, but due to lack of programming skills we don't think it's a good 
idea to allow them to build their own IOCs.

     I agree that the best way to work is not to put those scripts 
inside BOY, but could I suggest to put some protection mechanisms that 
allow CS-Studio to run smoothly even if an embedded script runs in an 
accidental continuous loop?

     Thank you again,

-- 
Márcio Paduan Donadio
Computer Engineer - Beamline Operation Software
Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron – (LNLS)
Centro Nacional de Pesquisa em Energia e Materiais (CNPEM)
+ 55 (19) 3512-3520 - [email protected]
www.lnls.cnpem.br


On 28-07-2015 12:53, Kasemir, Kay wrote:
>> On Jul 28, 2015, at 10:29 AM, Márcio Paduan Donadio <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>          Dear Folks,
>>
>>      is there a way to run a python script in a BOY widget in a thread
>> separate from BOY? We are facing CS-Studio freezing by scripts that take
>> too much time to run.
> See BOY Examples/5_6_UseThreadInScript.opi
>
> The use of scripts, however, is discouraged in general.
> The script API is not guaranteed to stay as it is.
> In fact any attempt to improve the BOY performance (https://github.com/ControlSystemStudio/cs-studio/issues/1230) is almost guaranteed to break your scripts.
> Don’t implement any processing logic in a script which should really be on an IOC.
> If you have to ask how to do things in a script, you’re likely to cause more trouble than good.
>
> Thanks,
> Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System