EPICS

EPICS XCas Module

Module Owner:
Benjamin Franksen

This page is the home of the EPICS XCas module, which provides a high-level abstraction modelled after the IOC runtime database on top of the portable Channel Access Server library. It is intended to be easy to use and provides complete support for the usual PV attributes as required by advanced CA client application such as the MEDM.

This site gives access to the software source code, information on other modules which are needed to install and run it, and documentation on the how to include and use it in your EPICS applications. Please email any comments and bug reports to the module owner who is responsible for coordinating development and releases.

Bernhard Kuner is co-author and therefore also familiar with this module.

Supported Plattforms

At the moment, the module is tested and used only under MS Windows (NT series). I'll try to compile it under HP-UX, now that I'm told that to make aCC understand things like std::, one simply has to set the correct compiler switches.

Where to Find it

You can download the software directly from the link in the table below:
 
Module Version EPICS Release Filename Documentation
1-1
R3.13.3
XCas1-1.tgz
short doc, not really up-to-date

For documentation, see also the examples contained in the package.

Site Installation and Building

After obtaining a copy of the distribution, it must be installed and built for use at your site. These steps only need to be performed once for the site (unless versions of the module running under different releases of EPICS and/or the other required modules are needed).

  1. Create an installation directory for the module, usually this will end with /support/XCas.
  2. Unpacking the distribution tar file produces a <supporttop> directory named after the release number.
  3. Edit the config/RELEASE file and set the path to your installation of EPICS.
  4. Run gnumake in the top level directory and check for any compilation errors. If you feel overwhelmed by gnumake's output, try the option -s (silent).
  5. Please email me so I can keep track of which sites are using this software.

For a quick start, if you have installed MS VisualStudio, just double-click the XCas.dsw icon inside the installation directory to open a MSVS workspace. This will contains project descriptions (*.dsp) for all the subdirectories. You have to change the project settings to include the path to your EPICS base installation directories for include files, binaries, and libraries.

The XCas itself is contained in the subdirectory XCasApp. The other application directories contain example applications. XCasMFCApp is an example using the MS Foundation Classes (Microsoft's Windows GUI Toolkit), XCasConsoleApp is a simple console based example.

In Use

This software is used at BESSY and PITZ (Photo Injector Teststand Zeuthen).

Acknowledgements

This module was originally based on software written by Kay-Uwe Kasemir from LANL.

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