1. VisualDCT – New features and future development Sunil Sah, Rok Šabjan, Matej Šekoranja sunil.sah@cosylab.com, rok.sabjan@cosylab.com,matej.sekoranja@cosylab.com Presented at the EPICS Meeting in Padova, 2008-10-15

2. Cosylab 2007 2 Acknowledgements The work was funded by the NSLS-II project at BNL Special thanks goes to Bob Dalesio and Don Dohan for their valuable inputs

3. Cosylab 2007 3 Spreadsheet Introduction VisualDCT: Visual representation of EPICS database Benefits: Spatial data organization  logical grouping  visible data dependencies  traceable processing patterns Drawbacks: Type oriented information is dispersed  does not enable grouping of similar records  does not enable editing of multiple fields belonging to one type  some people still prefer vi to manage substitution files Solution: multiple views of the same database  spatial + spreadsheet

4. Cosylab 2007 4 Spreadsheet Overview Type oriented view Interface to other spreadsheet applications  clipboard operations Data scope  spatial selection of input  default view: displaying nondefault data  user defined view customizations Persistence  view stored together with data  in db file, in relational database

5. Cosylab 2007 5 Spreadsheet Features Basic spreadsheet functionality  copy/paste, drag and drop  selection by rectangular blocks or rows  undo/redo View customization  column/row hidding  column/row sorting (by content, group, preset orders)

6. Cosylab 2007 6 Spreadsheet Features (Cont.) Column splitting  manipulate data below the level of a field value  split by delimiters or pattern using regular expressions

7. Cosylab 2007 7 Spreadsheet Features (Cont. 2) Field manipulation  counters Rec, Rec, Rec -> Rec1, Rec2, Rec3  number macro expansions Rec[0-3]_def[0-1] -> Rec0_def0, Rec0_def1, Rec1_def0, Rec1_def1,... Field verification  record name pattern, links configuration  default xml configuration  custom plugin implementation Implemented in build 1273

8. Cosylab 2007 8 Current efforts Completed tasks  Multiple window support Db persistence in the RDB Enabling cross-db development  multiple epics databases stored in a relational database  support for cross-db editing/validation

9. Cosylab 2007 9 Future work Open questions  descriptive vs. prescripive RDB  dbd files vs. definitions stored in RDB New Tasks  RDB support for VisualDCT templates  support object-like inheritance  Versioning  using cvs,...  IRMIS component type driven VisualDCT JavaIOC compatible VDCT  The majority of VDCT needs to be rewritten Re-design of the visual part (Eclipse, DESY)

10. Cosylab 2007 10 Thank You for Your Attention