Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Giacomo S." <[email protected]> · Fri, 1 Sep 2017 16:59:04 +0200

Hello all Epics world, I am Giacomo Strangolino from the Elettra
Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Trieste, Italy.

I am new to Epics, and I am writing a C++ multi threaded library in
order to write GUIs in Qt and I have the following constraints:

- I want to monitor a pv in a separate thread;

- when a new value is available, I want a callback to be invoked (always
in the same background thread). There I extract data and forward it to
the main (GUI) thread.

- the background thread implements a wait condition so that it sleeps
until a new event arrives (for example, exit event or new variable to be
monitored is added)

I set things up like this in the init() method of a class I called
"CuMonitorActivity".

I used a pv structure as in camonitor C example:

void CuMonitorActivity::init()
{
    int caTimeout = DEFAULT_TIMEOUT;
    int reqElems = 1;

    int nPvs = 1;
    pv* pvs;                    /* Array of PV structures */
    int result = ca_context_create(ca_enable_preemptive_callback);
    if (result != ECA_NORMAL) {
        ...
    }
    else
    {
        /* Allocate PV structure array */

        pvs = (pv *) calloc (nPvs, sizeof(pv));
        if (!pvs)
        {
            ...
        }
        else {
            /* Connect channels */
            memset(pvs[0].name, 0, 256);
            strncpy(pvs[0].name, "giacomo:ai1", 255);
            pvs[0].monitor_activity = this; /* store a reference to this
object to be used in the callback */

            /* Create CA connections */
            int returncode = create_pvs(pvs, nPvs, connection_handler_cb);
            if ( returncode ) {
                ...
            }
        }

    }
    publishResult(tk);
}

NOTE: I enabled preemptive_callback so that I get
connection_handler_cb() called regularly when a new event arrives

 From within connection_handler_cb I extract the current
CuMonitorActivity instance (stored in pv's monitor_activity field) and I
invoke the object's extraction method. Data is posted in the main thread.

NOTE: I notice that connection_handler_cb is invoked from ANOTHER
thread, not my main thread, not my secondary thread. This should be as
expected I guess for things to work and given the ca_
enable_preemptive_callback option.

* when I post an "exitEvent" on my secondary thread from the main one
(e.g. the GUI is closed),  "ca_context_destroy();" is invoked in my
secondary thread (not the Epics thread that calls connection_handler_cb
during monitoring - is this OK? )

* Is there a way to ADD more PVs to monitor WHILE others are being
monitored (for example, is it legit to call create_pvs() again ) ?

* Are there any observations/corrections to my approach and to my
statements above?

Thanks for Your attention.

Giacomo Strangolino, Italy.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System