epicsQt

EPICS Qt 3.9 Release Notes

Release Index

r3.9.3

Release date: 14th December 2023.

general

A couple Qt6 compatability updates (fonts and signal names) - details below, together with the details about other changes.

Note: EPICS Qt is regularly build using Qt5.12.8 and Qt6.4 on a variety of Linux platforms. Qt5.6 and earlier no longer supported. Other versions have not been tried.

qeframework

QECalcout

Keep intermediate calc and ocal std::string variables in scope as to avoid QString to char* corruption.

QERadioGroup

Ensure button status reflects current status on startup (applies when button style is push).

QERadioGroup, QEAnalogSlider, QENumericEdit

The code has been modified in order to be consistant re how we inhibit emiting updates. No functional change per se.

QESimpleShape

Added a useStyleAlarmColors property, which defaults to false. When set, background alarm colours used are the same as a QELabel. Also updated so that the edge grays out on edge PV disconnect.

QEScaling

Hide QEImage internal widgets from being scaled; the QEImage widget does not scale very well. The code also updated to use qobject_cast where possible.

QEImage

Added new feature for 3rd party plugins and display managers: a/ provide progromatic capbility to reset brightness and contrast; and b/ provide capability register function to provide a customised paint capability.

The QEImage tool tip now reflects the PVs connected and/or alarm states. This is Only relevent if/when the variableAsToolTip property is enabled.

QEScalarHistogram

Updated so that disconnected and/or invalid values are clearly displayed, as opposed to bing hidden as a result of a “zero” value.

QEBaseClient

Re-locate ChannelModes from QEPvaClient; add null type client. [Preping for a QCaObject re-organisation, no functional change per se]

QEPvNameUri

Added a protocolImage QString getter method.

QEThreadSafeQueue

Add a thread safe queue template (based on code from PVA client). This is not used yet.

QE2DDataVisualisation

Updated to add a used log scale property, default to false.

The QESpectrogram widget has been updated to add a log scale capability together with log scale context menu item. The other 2D data widgets currently ignore this property.

QCaAlarmInfoColorNamesManager

This has been updated to allow use of regular expressions for defining out of service (OOS) PV names.

QEPvProperties

Dropped the VERS field from the record field list for the concat record. The concat record now implements this as an attribute.

ui files

Remove explicit Sans Serif and/or size 10 font selection for the font property, and now just use the default font and size. This this improves the apprearance in Qt6 which has a diffent default font.

QEScratchPad

Added the record type RTYP attribute (pseudo field) to the scratch pad widget.

QESelector, QEStripChartToolBar

Make Qt6 compatible with respect to signal names.

qegui

No change.

r3.9.2

Release date: 17th August 2023.

general

The most significant change for this release is the way in which external process are launched using QEPushButton, QEMenuButton etc., specifically the arguments are kept separated and not concatinated, with the command, into a single command string.

We got away with it in Qt5 however Qt6 is more strict/correct.

Note: Previously a ui file with a ‘single’ argument of the form, for example:

-r  "Stored Beam"

would have been okay with Qt5. However with Qt6 this will not work. These must be specified as two arguments, the second without quotes, as follows:

-r
Stored Beam

The applicationLauncher make no attempt to 2nd-guess the user’s intention. Arguments are passed as specified in the QEPushButton (and others) widget’s arguments string list.

qeframework

Archive data retrieval

The framework now allows .SEVR and .STAT (severity and status) PV values to be retrieved from the archiver (and plotted on the Strip Chart).

QEWaveformHistogram

The size of number of elements sanity check value has been increased to 100000.

QEImage

Modified to add an axis draw capability for the profiles. This feature is selectable in designer using the enableProfileAxes property and in the run-time image dialog.

Note: This applies to all three axes: horizontal, vertical and arbitary line.

applicationLauncher

The applicationLauncher class has been updated to handle arguments as separate objects (in a QStringList) as opposed to being all bundling into the command string. This is essentially the oreviously commented out alternate (and cleaner) way to run the program. Also a bit of code layout tweaking.

QEMenuButton

This widget has been updateed to use a QStringList for program arguments (a la QEPushButton).

The designer set up dialog associated with the QEMenuButton now allows the argument to be edited as a string list - this editor is similar in look and feel as the built-in string list property editor. The dialog now has a better (as in similar to designer) reset icon for the quazi properties.

Note: The QEMenuButton widget remains backwards compatible with ui files created by earlier versions which stored the program arguments as space separeted text in a single string.

Default Protocol

Allow the default provider/protocol to be specified as adaptation parameter. E.g. to use PV Access in stead of Channel Access by default, define the environment variable QE_DEFAULT_PROVIDER as “pva”. On Linux:

export QE_DEFAULT_PROVIDER=pva

QEPeriodic

Updated to spell Sulphur element name correctly (as in Australia/UK). This should have no impact unless 3rd party code relies on the name out of QEPeriodic::elementInfo (as one of our plugins does).

QEPvProperties

Show the enumeration index value as prefix to each enumeration value, together with some minor layout tweaks.

For normative NTScalar and NTArray types, extract value type and use this to qualifiy the PV id which used in QEPvProperties.

Update record field list to add the new alarm messahe (NAMSG) field introduced in base-7.0.7, and updated the text associated with the DOL fields.

QEStripChart

When loading/restoring a configuration, do not attempt to insert beyond the end of the predefined PV name list and thus avoid a seg. fault. This only impacts Qt6, Qt5 is a little more forgiving of this error.

For the QEStripChart tool bar, removed Lock and PV status place holders tabs which were a hang over from the Delphi original and not required.

QEComboBox, QERadioGroup

Both widgets now have an ‘Apply current selection’ option available in their context menu. This is particularly usefull if current value is undefined as in INVALID/UDF (typically on IOC start) and allows the value to be set without selecting a different value first.

QSimpleShape

This widget has been modified to include a noshape and a tick shape. This change is also reflected in the QESimpleShape widget.

QEPlot

The widget now checks for NaN and Inf values and does not attempt to plot them.

Also added logScale plotting mode (y-axis) to the widget. This can be selected by using the logScale property.

qegui

The only change is is a modifcation to the help text to include info about the new provider environment variable.

r3.9.1

Release date: 6th March 2023.

general

The most significant change to the EPICS Qt framework for the 3.9 release series is that the framework is now compatible with Qt6 (specifically the changes were developed and tested using Qt6.4.0). Some of these changes mean that the framework is now no longer compatible with some earlier versions of Qt5 (specifically it still compiles against Qt5.12.8, however it no longer compiles against Qt5.6) and is definitly no longer compatible with Qt4.

Note: some conditional statements have been added to allow the framework to build against both Qt5.12.8 and Qt6.4.0. All of these are of the form of the following example taken from QEPlatform.h

#if QT_VERSION < 0x060000
#define QEKeepEmptyParts QString::KeepEmptyParts
#define QESkipEmptyParts QString::SkipEmptyParts
#else
#define QEKeepEmptyParts Qt::KeepEmptyParts
#define QESkipEmptyParts Qt::SkipEmptyParts
#endif

All the version tests are Qt5 vs. Qt6 irrespective of when the change was introduced by Qt. If needs be, these test can be easily modified to be more precise and feedback in this regard is always welcome.

The modification to achieve Qt6 compatibility are:

Use of QRegularExpression in lieu of QRegExp.
Use of setContentsMargins in lieu of setMargin.
Use of drawRoundedRect in lieu of drawRoundRect.
Use of QFontMetrics horizontalAdvance in lieu of width.
Use of QString::asprintf in lieu of the sprintf method.
Use of setForeground (brush) and setBackground (brush) in lieu of setBackgroundColor (colour) and setTextColor (colour) respectively.
How to determine desktop and screen geometry.

There are many QVariant warnings when I build against Qt6 and these are still to be addressed.

While the main purposed of this release is Qt6 compatibility, a number of other updates have also been included and these are detailed below.

qeframework

QENumbericEdit

The widget has been modified to stop doing an auto-write to PV on first update if writeOnChange is true and the widget has been updated to conform to any DRVL/DRVH and/or LOPR/HOPR constraints. This fix was contributed by Christian Notthoff.

QEStringFormatting

The framework no longer trims leading and trailing spaces when writing a string value to a PV.

QEPvProperties

Added the pycalc record (out pf pyDevice) fields to the list of known record types.

QECorrelation

The widget now allows a much smaller display span (1.0e-12) and uses a more flexible value presentation format.

QEForm/QEFormGroupBox

Both these widgets have new slot functions setUiFileName and setUiFileSubstitutions that modify the uiFile and variableSubstitutions properties respectively. This allows dynamic form selection and/or substitutions at run time from any other widget that can provide a sutable QString signal.

QEForm has also had a code scrub. Many methods are now defined in the QEForm.cpp file as opposed to header, and have been made const where applicable.

QEGraphicNames/QEGraphicMarkup

Added four markups, namely two horizontal marker lines and two vertical marker lines. Unlike most of the other markups, these are entirely under program control.

QEPlot

The QEPlot widget now exposes the embedded QEGraphic object to allow 3rd party plugin/display manger manipulation of the available markups.

QEPlotter

The QEPlotter has two new optional PV variable name properties, viz: xMarkerVariable and yMarkerVariable.

If/when the xMarkerVariable connects and provides a value, the new vertical marker line is set visible and the value is used to set its position. If the xMarkerVariable PV disconnects, the vertical marker is set non-visible.

The same applies to the yMarkerVariable and the horizontal marker line.

QAnalogSlider (and hence QEAnalogSlider)

Added an invertedApperance property, that is applies to he interbnal QSlider widget and the axis below the slider.

QETable

Added some text formatting properties, namely: addUnits, forceSign, format, separator and notation. These have same meaning as per the QELabel widget.

QECheckBox (also QEPushButton and QERadioButton)

The QECheckBox is a little more forgiving when decoding the update text to determining if the button should be checked or unchecked. If the PV text matchs neither the clickText and clickCheckedText properties, then if the underlying PV provides an integer value (such as from an mbbi, bo etc. record) and an integer value can be extracted from clickText and clickCheckedText strings then the integer values are used to determining if the button should be checked or unchecked. If the integer values do noth match, the widget generates an error message and prints a debug message.

QECaClient

Modified this unit to perform the QVariant to EPICS type conversion, which makes it more symetrical (this unit also does the EPICS type to QVariant conversion), and more consistant with the PvaClient. QECaClient also includes a value range check - needs acai 1.6.4 or later. These changes allow the IntegerFormatting and the FloatFormatting to be simplified.

QCaObject

Added a number of conveniance functions, including reading/wrting boolean values, and writing integer and floating arrays. This change only usefull to those wrting their own 3rd party widgets.

standardProperties

The unit now treats setting the displayAlarmStateOptions and/or oosAware like a string formatting change, i.e. cause the widget to update immediately. This change only usefull to those wrting their own 3rd party widgets.

framework.pro

The project file now directly calls up required ADSupport libraries as opposed to the HDF5 plugin libraries (the issue became apparent doing a buile on Ubuntu 22.04).

archapplDataSup

Removed spurious non-error error message when building archapplDataSup.

QEEnum

Removed QEEnum.h (for now) - it will only needed by EPICS Qt version 4.

qegui

No functional changes for this release. The help information (-h,–help option) has been updated to reflect the new record types supported by QEPvProperties.

Earlier Releases

Please see the release notes 3.8 page for the the 3.8 series release notes.

Please see the release notes 3.7 page for the the 3.7 series release notes.

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: Tue Dec 12 18:59:11 AEDT 2023

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