epicsQt

EPICS Qt 3.7 Release Notes

Release Index

r3.7.6
r3.7.5
r3.7.4
r3.7.3
r3.7.2
r3.7.1
Earlier Releases

r3.7.6

Expected Release date: 29th May 2021.

I have stopped active support for Qt4, and while I won’t be removing any Qt4 version conditional compilation checks, I won’t be adding any new ones either.

qegui

The significant qegui changes are described below.

new options

–known_pvs_list, -k

This option defines name of a file that provides a list of know PV names. This list augments any PV names retrieved from the archiver and is used when using regular expression name search in the PV name selection dialog as used by the StripChart for example.

–out_of_service, -z

This option defines name of a file that provides a list of out-of-service PV names. Such PVs are displayed using the out of service blue “alarm” colour.

For now, the name check is an exact name match, e.g. FOO and FOO.VAL are considered to be different PV names.

Note: The definition of what out-of-service means is up to you.

qeframework

The significant changes to the qeframework for this release are described below.

Documentation

The documentation has been relocated from the documentation folder in the qeframework repository to the qtepics.github.io repository.

Shared Memory

Removed the shared memory management - this no longer required since the library was split (i.e. the dual purpose QEFramework library became standard QEFramework non-plugin library and separate QEPlugin plugin library - release 3.5.1), and as such the QEFramework library is no longer loaded twice on Windows.

QEWaveformHistogram

Add PV name selection capability to this widget via its context menu.

QEPvProperties

Modified this widget to read a single value for main (usually .VAL) PV (this is especially important for very large arrays).

Note: this broke items like CALC_RECORD.INPA$ when looking at the INPA field. This has since been fixed but will not available until the next release, or you could try HEAD - this is usually a very safe bet anyways.

Modified to use lower case labels for time, host and now just display simple element count.

Re-ordered the LOLO, LOW, HIGH, HIHI fields into ascending order in record field lists definition file and added VAL to the set of waveform fields.

2D Data Visualisation widgets

Improved readouts and readout options. Added more context menu options: extended auto-scale on/off to manual, operating range, dynamic range or currently displayed data range. Added a false colour flip context meu option for QESpectrogram. Documentation is still lagging.

Note: QESurface as is being totally revamped to use a home-grown widget based on the original Delphi surface rather than the built in Qt surface - details on the next release.

QEPlot

Added time/x and y value readouts and/or signal options. This can be any or all of:

PV Name selection dialog

This is normally populated with PV names retried from the archiver(s).

Added a means to add global PV name list to the PV name selection dialog. Note: qegui still to be modified to leverage off this.

Also removed the restriction re the maximum element count on the PV name selection combo-box.

QEPVLoadSave PV Name Selection dialog.

Created a variation of the standard PV name selection dialog specifically for the QEPVLoadSave widget. This allows up-to three PV names to be specified (for write, read and archive access). This is a lot easier to use when entering two or three PV names compared to using the syntax used to display the two/three PV names.

QEStripChart

The strip chart now allows the specification of alias names (at design time only) and allows showing/hiding the tool bar and the PV items, both similar to the QEPlotter widget.

If the alias name is specified, the alias name is used in the strip chart’s PV bar as opposed to the actual PV name. Introduced a context menu item to allow the selection of:

Style Manager

Updated the QE widgets style manager such that the connection style takes precedence over the alarm severity style. This ensures text for disconnected QELabels and the like becomes grayed out.

r3.7.5

Release date: 7th December 2020.

qeframework

The significant changes to the qeframework associated with this release are described below.

QECaClient

The class now handles the QByteArray variant data type on write. The consequence of this is that the qeframework now requires acai 1-5-8 or later.

2D Data Visualisation widgets

Release 3.7.5 sees the introduction of three 2D visualisation widgets, namely QESpectrogram, QEWaterfall and QESurface. QESurface is only functional with Qt 5.7 or later and also required the datavisualization to be installed. If the QT datavisualization module not available, comment out both of the following lines in the framework.pro project file (approx line 80):

DEFINES += QE_DATA_VISUALISATION
QT += datavisualization

These widgets all allow the presentation of 1D and 2D data in various formats.

When the data is 1D, the widgets will accumulate a fixed number of 1D data sets (not unlike the compress record) to form a 2D data set.

When the data is 2D, a second variable may be specified to define the “width” of the data. Alternatively a hard coded property value may be used to define the width.

See the QE2DDataVisualisation.pdf documentation for details.

Please note: while these widgets are functional, they are still under development and therefore the normal ‘try hard to maintain backward compatibility philosophy’ will not apply here.

QEAxisPainter

To support the new widgets, this class has been updated to provide a paint method to also draw on a QPainter object, and fix a few typos.

Out of Service (OOS)

Introduced Out of Service quazi alarm state capability. The QCaAlarmInfo support class QCaAlarmInfoColorNamesManager now provides the following:

static void setOosPvNameList (const QStringList& pvNameList);

which allows the declaration of a number of PV being “out-of-service”.

An out of service PV is displayed with a blue background and the tool tip, if displayed, includes the text “OOS” next to the alarm state. The OOS colour may be modified by use of the QE_STYLE_COLOR_NAMES and QE_COLOR_NAMES environment variables. Please see the documentation and environment variables page for details.

An oosAware property, default true, has been added to applicable widgets. This controls if a widget is sensitive to its “out-of-service” status.

Note: This functionality requires bespoke plugin to call setOosPvNameList. There is no means provided by which qegui can call this function.

displayAlarmStateOption property

This has been extended to include a WhenInvalid option in order to provide extra control on how widgets respond to alarm states.

QEPvLoadSaveButton, QEScript, QEConfiguredLayout and QEFileBrowser

These widgets have been updated to remove non-applicable properties relating to aspects of QEWidget managed PV connections, such as variableNameAsTooltip and displayAlarnStateOption.

QEPvLoadSave

Set widget properties to be suitable for a widget with no QEWidget managed variables.

Separate PV names may now be specified for reading and writing. For example, this widget can be configured to write a motor records .VAL field, but read from its .RBV field. Indeed it could be configured to write to and read from two totally different records.

This is described in QEPvLoadSave specified document which has been created as a stand-alone document.

QEPvLoadSaveButton

Updated to be compatible with earlier version of the gcc/g++ compiler.

QEImage

The setImage, setDataImage and setPvaImage slot functions are now public, by tech-talk request.

QNumericEdit/QENumericEdit

For the QNumericEdit::setInternalValue and QEFixedPointRadix::toString() functions, we now check for nan and inf values to avoid any unpleasantness.

QSimpleShape

Added alignment and indent properties for text positioning (similar to QLabel).

PV Name Selection dialog

This dialog is used by the QEStripChart and other widgets to select PV names. A regular expression may be used to filter PV names received from the archiver(s). The dialog has been updated to save the filtered PV names and re-populate the combo-box the next time the dialog is re-opened.

qegui

No change to the qegui application per se.

qeBinaries

The new 3.7.5 rpm and msi files will be made available after formal release.

r3.7.4

Release date: 24th July 2020.

qeframework

The significant changes to the qeframework associated with this release are described below.

QEPvLoadSaveButton

The QEPvLoadSaveButton is a new widget that allows a nominated xml file of PV names and associated PV values (it uses the same format as used by QEPvLoadSave) to be read and the values from the file written to the PVs.

The widget can also be used to capture a set of PV values and update the xml file.

QEPlot

This widget as been modified to add optional sizeVaraibles (similar to the size variables used in QEPlotter) to limit the number of array elements that are plotted.

One use case would be using a sscan record’s current point (.CPT) field in order to only plot up-to and including the current scan point.

QELineEdit

The QEgenericEdit parent class has been modified to introduced a dropOptions property to allow DropToText and DropToTextAndWrite in addition to the default/implict DropToVariable option.

This allows, for example, dragging a detector PV from a QELabel to a QELineEdit widget connected to the .D01PV field of a sscan record, which will then write the PV name associated with the QELabel to the sscan record’s .D01PV field.

Alarm styles

The default framework background alarm colour names (as used by QELables etc) and the solid alarm colour names (as used by graphical widgets) can now be redefined using using environment variables. Please see the documentation and environment variables page for details.

QESimpleShape

QESimpleShape has been updated to ensure that the PV value used to select the stateSet text, irrespective of the value of the displayAlarmStateOption property. Use the .SEVR field if you want the state text selected by the alarm severity.

QEPlotter

Updated the QEPlotter widget to be more tolerant of NaN and +/-Inf PV values.

qegui

No change to the qegui application per se.

For the run_qegui.bat, run_qt_designer.bat and run_qerad.bat scripts, we now set the QT_PLUGIN_PATH by using the to %QE_FRAMEORK% variable as opposed to being hard coded.

For the EPICS Qt installer config file, added our new archives to the specification of the QE_ARCHIVE_LIST environment variable. This is only applicable to Australian Synchrotron users. Other sites will have to manually define QE_ARCHIVE_LIST.

Updated qeguiApp RELEASE and CONFIG_SITE file to be more configurable with respect to caQtDM integration.

qeReadArchive

Fixed the time zone issues with the qerad program.

The qerad program now uses double quotes in the help time string examples - this makes the examples compatible with Windows. Also updated examples to 2020.

qeBinaries

New 3.7.4 rpm and msi file available after formal release.

documentation

The documentation files, in the qeframework repository, have been updated to reflect the above changes. Also the documentation for the following widgets:

have now be separated into their own documents.

r3.7.3

Release date: 16th April 2020.

The main feature of this release is is a rework of the QEPlot widget, the introduction of a new QEDateTime widget, updates to cater for latest protobuf version and how the archapplDataSup support library is built, and PVA image decompression.

qeframework

General

When a QE_UI_PATH variable directory ended …, the framework used to search all sub-directories for the given file name. The search mechanism has been updated to include the top level directory itself when … used.

QEPlot

The QEPlot widget has undergone a significant upgrade. The new features are:

Under-the-covers, QEPlot now uses QEGraphic (as opposed to qwt directly). We also updated the QEPlot documentation and split into a separate document file.

QEScalarHistogram and QEWaveformHistogram

These widgets now inherit directly from QEHistogram, as opposed to inheriting from QEFrame and containing a QEHistogram instance. For the most part, this change has no impact, other than when opening a ui file that contains a QEScalarHistogram or QEWaveformHistogram in designer, you will get a warning message like:

The file contains a custom widget 'QEWaveformHistogram' whose base class
(QEFrame) differs from the current entry in the widget database
(QEHistogram). The widget database is left unchanged.

The only impact is if you have written bespoke display manager and/or your own plugin that contains a QEScalarHistogram or QEWaveformHistogram widget. For the base class QEHistogram, the set/getPrecsion functions associated with the axis precision property have been re-named to set/getAxisPrecision. These are not only more precise function named, bit also avoid a name clash/ambiguity due to the inheritance restructuring.

QEDateTime

QEDateTime is a new non-EPICS aware widget that allows the current date and time to be displayed on a ui form. The format is controlled using the dateTimeFormat property. The time zone can be either local time or UTC (essentially GMT) and appended to the displayed date time if needed.

archapplDataSup

Added a configuration variable to enable (default) or disable c++11 support for archapplDataSup build.

Updated archapplDataSup/src Makefile to more closely follow the standard EPICS Makefile paradigm. Note: A consequence of this is that on Windows, the generated archapplData.DLL is now installed in the bin/ folder as opposed to the lib/ folder.

The Makefile has also been modified to use PROTOBUF_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable iff defined, and add related explanation note to CONFIG_SITE.

Modified Archive Appliance interface module to add support for long int types.

PVA Image Decompression (QENTNDArrayData)

When ADSUPPORT environment variable defined or specified in the qeframwork’s configuration RELEASE file, the QENTNDArrayData variant type now provides a a means to decompress images that have been compressed using Area Detector’s codec plugin. The codecs supported are jpeg, blosc, lz4, and bslz4. The decompression is performed used function out of the ADSupport module.

QEImage has been updated to request decompression of PVA images.

QEPvProperties

Added field description column to the PV properties widget. The internal record field list configuration file has been updated to include field description for most record type (derived for the each record’s dbd file).

Updated the QEPvProperties widget to handle the re-scaling of column widths as more-or-less expected, and clear all columns, not just the field name column when a new PV selected.

QECorrelation

Allow smaller sample time interval on the QECorrelation widget. The minimum value has been reduced from 0.2sec to 0.05 sec.

QEPushButton, QERadioButton, QECheckBox

For enums values to variant conversion, when the format property is defined as Default, the conversion now accept integer values as well as enumeration strings. We check for enumeration string values first, and then integer values. This similar behavior to caput. Note: this excludes local enumeration (for now).

Extend the options for the disablesRecordPolocy property (was “ignore” and “grayout”) to include a “disable” option. This disables the widget when the PV status indicated disabled. We modified whole underlying mechanism to use the PV’s STATus value as opposed to subscribing for DISA and DISV fields which are not monitored. The benefits are less PVs, and works for non IOC record PVs as well.

QEArchiveStatus

The QEArchiveStatus widget has been modified to add an update button to manually request PV information and meta data from the defined archives. This is in addition to the automatic once-a-day update.

Also use a grid layout for the archive status widget, and increase the maximum number of allowed archives from 20 to 40.

QEStripChart statistics

Take special action when units are /s, /sec, /min and /Hr when determining the units for the area under curve integration. This was cribbed directly from the Delphi StripChart.

QEStripChart/QEPvLoadSave time selection

The associated time selection dialogs for both these widgets have been updated to make minimum calendar widget sizes a bit larger, and also make the widgets stretch as the dialog forms are stretched.

QEGraphic

Perform dynamic axis scaling on both left and right axis. Be explicit with use of QwtPlot::yLeft axis selection instead of relying on the axis argument default value, this will only impact users building against the QEFramework library, however this changes does not impact used of the QEPlugin library.

qegui

Windows position

Ensure qegui first’s form on Windows is in a sensible location for the case when the taskbar is located at top of screen.

Added a histogram option to the default qegui menu. This opens an from holding an empty QEWaveformHistogram widget onto which PV names can be pasted or onto which EPICS aware widgets can be dragged and dropped. The WaveformHistogram.ui form updated updated to reflect new widget inheritance.

msi configuration file

Update the wxs file for 3.7.3 release. Added qeReadArchive as part of the generated msi file. Created a simple candle + light convenience bat script.

qeBinaries

New 3.7.3 msi file available.

r3.7.2

Release date: 11th November 2019.

The main feature of this release is the revamping of the caQtDm integration. Please see caQtDM integration documentation for details. The other changes are itemised below.

qeframework

QEStripChart

Setting QEStripChart PV variable names in designer now works as expected.

When calculating distribution statistics, avoid the potential divide by zero and subsequent segmentation fault.

There have been three additional preset PV scaling options to the strip chart. These are re-scale plotted data to upper, lower and centre third of the chart

Sorted out font on StripChart toolbar (especially when global style sheet is being applied). Also now apply a consistant formatting for zero values.

This widget has been modified to include markup settings when saveing and/or restoring configuration data.

QEMenuButton

Updated the setup dialog to introduce a 3:5 stretch ratio for each side of the dialog.

The default name is now name… (as opposed to ‘X’ plus number).

QEScalarHistogram and QEWaveformHistogram

Added readout format properties to scalar and waveform histogram widgets. These are a subset of the usual display format properties.

QEImage

Made QEImage more robust with respect to dynamic scaling.

PV Access

Updated PV Access related functionality for base-7.0.3. Now process precision and have dropped using format (form is still to be done). The hysteresis is alwayus extracted as a byte from alarmValue. Introduced opaque variant type for unknown/unhandled PVA types.

general

Removed use of deprecated functions.

documentation

Reworked QBitStatus/QEBitStatus documentation, and delivered as a separate document.

Removed the old readme.txt file and Updated the README.md file.

QEGui

caQtDM

Support for caQtDM integration has been revampled and we now support V4. Please see the caQtDM integration page for details. Note: caQtDM integration is still optional.

Running

qegui -v

reveals if caQtDM integration has been included.

Dialogs

The various dialogs (about, saveConfig, restoreConfig and manageConfig) now use QEDialog so that the dialog itself is located in the middle of the relavent form. Ensure we save and relocate to the intial startup directory when using config related dialogs.

designer

When opening designer, QEGui used to check for designer-qt4 program and then the designer program. Now we just attempt to callup designer. Qt 4.8 users should fake designer to call designer-qt4.

structure

The QEGui files have been restructured. The UISamples folder have beem moved from the qeguiApp/project directory to own top level uiSamples directory. The header files have been colocated with corresponding .cpp files in the qeguiApp/project/src folder.

qeBinaries

New 3.7.2 msi and rpm files available.

The new msi file includes a wrapper script for qegui and designer, so that we don’t clobber the ‘global’ QT_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable which can then break other programs.

r3.7.1

Formal release date: 29th August 2019.

general

The most significant change to the EPICS Qt framework going from the 3.6 releases to the 3.7 release series is that the framework is now capable of supporting the PV Access protocol for some of the normative types available via PV Access. For NTNDArray type only 8bit mono images are currently supported, and will be fixed for release 3.7.2

Refer to the pv access page for details of this update. NOTE: this includes important build information.

The more “mundane” changes since the previous release are detailed below.

documentation

The unwieldy large QE_QEGuiAndUserInterfaceDesign document has been made more manageable by extracting widget specific information into another document, namely: QEWidgetSpecifications. This in turn may be further split in future releases, and the documentation for any new widgets such as QEDistibution and QEFormStateChange will have their own standalone document.

qtepics.github.io

The markdown files within this depo. have under gone a restructure and general renewal. The large index.md has been broken up into a number of smaller, topic related and more manageable files.

Within the qtepics.github.io repository in the tools directory is the qe_git_test_build script that is used to check build-ability after each commit or set of commits to github. For Linux users, this could be used as the basis to create your own build script suited to meet your own particular needs.

qeBinaries

In the qeBinaries repository there are the following files:

EPICS_Qt_Installer_3_7_1.msi

This installs qegui, designer and the required libraries. You also get a copy of caget and caput. This does not include the PV Access functionality as it built against base-3.15, nor does it include the ffMpeg capability.

epicsQt-3.7.1-el7.x86_64.rpm

This rpm installs qegui, designer and the required libraries. It was assembled and tested on a CentOS 7 box. It may work on other distros that use the YUM package manager.

qeframework

QEDistrubtion

This is a new widget that can monitor a single PV and provides statistical information about the value i.e: min, max, mean and standard deviation. It also provides a graphical representation of this of this data. Please refer to the QEDistrubtion documentation (out of the qeframework repository).

QEFormStateChange

This is a new widget that provides the means for automatic actions to take place when a form is opened or closed. This is akin to having QEPushButton on the form which is automatically clicked when the form is opened and another when it is closed. The available actions are write a value to a PV and/or invoke a local script. It differs from a QEPushButton in that it cannot open another ui file. Please refer to the QEFormStateChange documentation.

QENTTable

This is a new widget specifically for the NTTable normative type. Please refer to the QEWidgetSpecifications documentation.

macro Expansion

This has been modified to avoid an annoying feature where defining a priority substitution in terms of an exiting substitution of the same name failed. So now, you can do something like:

P=$(P)ABC

and it will expanded as expected.

Also added a quick ‘nothing-to-do’ test in the substitute function.

writeNow functions

Many control widgets have a writeNow function which causes the current value to be written to the PV. These functions are now public slots such that the functionality can be triggered by a signal from another widget.

Alarm handling

When processing Archive Appliance data, the alarm severity was erroneously set as status and the status set as severity. This has now been now fixed.

QCaAlarmInfo’s severityName function now includes the Channel Access archive severity names as well.

Modified the QCaAlarmInfo::isInAlarm function to test severity as opposed to status.

QEAnalogProgressBar

Updated QEAnalogProgressBar to handle alarm colours more consistantly. Maid some functions in QEAnalogIndicator virtual and protected to help do this.

QEGroupBox, QRadioGroup and QERadioGroup

These widgets will now interpret a property title of “-“ as a blank title. Previously setting a title blank would result in the original default title, e.g. “QRadioButton”.

QEPushButton, QECheckBox and QERadioButton

Added a NoUpdate choice to the updateOption property for completeness for when the subscribe property is set true. This combination to allows alarm sensitivity without changing the button text.

QEPvLoadSave

This now provide summary of the number equal, not equal and n/a values for each group. This is shown as a three number tuple in the delta column.

Ensure action complete status set correctly when extracting data. This ensures the abort results are properly presented to the user.

QEPlotter

Added a normal/reverse video property to the QEPlotter, this replicates the QEStripChart look and feel.

QEScaling

QEScaling::getWidgetScaling function modified to take a const widget reference. Also, removed debug/info statements from scaling module, they served no useful purpose.

QESimpleShape/QSimpleShape

The QESimpleShape widget now copies both variable names when using the context menu copyVariable option and when dragging on to anything that accepts textual drops.

QESimpleShape modified to honor the “when in alarm state” option for both main and edge colours. User specified colours, when not in alarm, should be readily distinguishable from alarm colours if/when this option is used.

QSimpleShape - added some new shapes: star, cross, plus and pentagon. The cross and plus shapes are modify-able by the percentSize property.

Also created a shape selection slot function, which takes an int parameter. This means that shape itself may be controlled by a PV, possibly via a QELink or QECalcout widget. We will endeavor to keep the int value to shape mapping contestant if/when new shapes are added.

QEStripChart

The calculation capability and been extended to allow the calculation to be applied to data retrieved from the archive and to previously acquired live data.

The QEStripChart’s generate statistics functionality now includes a graphical presentation similar to QEDistribution.

QEPvProperties

The Ch1, Ch2, Ch3 and Ch4 fields have been added to the iTech liberaSignal record type’s field list specification. Note: the actual existence of some of the liberaSignal fields are device type dependent.

QEMenuButton

Added an icon and iconSize properties - these are passed to and handled by the internal QPushButton widget. Also changed the hint size height to match that of QPushButton.

Explicitly call connectChannel, needed for new qcaobject::QCaObject objects.

persistanceManager

The persistanceManager has been extended to support addValue/getValue for QColor type values. This is only relevant if you have created your own widgets.

applicationLauncher

The function parameters are now const where applicable. Also de-inlined the inline functions in order to de-clutter the header file.

qegui

Integrated the QEDistibution widget into qegui, there is a built in form that contains a single instance of the widget. It is accessable from the menu: Tools | PV Distribution…

Earlier Releases

Please see the release notes 3.6 page for the the 3.6 series release notes.

Please see the release notes 3.5 page for the the 3.5 series release notes.

Please see the release notes 3.4 page for the the 3.4 series release notes.

Last updated: Sat May 29 15:21:21 AEST 2021


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