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This page describes how to set and get control system values via rudimentary AIDA command line tools. These are available on LCLS production nodes without setup, and on SLAC public machines after going through the basic setup described in Basic User Guide to Aida (see also below for a summary).

Fetching Values: aidaget

The utility program named "aidaget" takes one mandatory argument (the name of the target). Here's a very simple example, as it happens getting an EPICS veriable's value:

aidaget HR81:STN:VOLT//VAL
  10-Sep-2008 12:09:40  0  0  0.18099030997326265

Several , and several optional parameters control how it works.  You can specify "-help" as a parameter to see simple options. Here's that same EPICS process variable, using options to display labels, and in rows format.

aidaget HR81:STN:VOLT//VAL -labels -format=rows
time        06-Nov-2006 10:30:05
status                         0
severity                       0
value        0.22782705806669729

.  Some of the more interesting options are specific to each data-provider, which may support optional or require mandatory paramters.

...

As you can see, data provider parameters are specified as -Dname1=value1 -Dname2=value2.  Note the need to enclose embedded whitespace within " marks to prevent the shell from treating it as a boundary between strings.  The output format may be specified as "columns" or "rows".  The only difference is that one is a transpose of the other.  The option "-labels" indicates that the columns (or rows) should be named.  Not all data providers supply these names, in which case you'll need to consult their documentation to interpret the column numbers.

Here's a simple example that retrieves an EPICS process variable, displaying in rows format.

aidaget HR81:STN:VOLT//VAL -labels -format=rows
time        06-Nov-2006 10:30:05
status                         0
severity                       0
value        0.22782705806669729

Getting BPM data:

aidaget P2BPMHER//BPMS -DBPMD=38 -DREF=0
  BPMS:PR10:6012       0.0       0.0  3128.0562           0.0        17       520
  BPMS:PR10:6022       0.0       0.0  3135.6562           0.0        17       520
  BPMS:PR10:6032       0.0       0.0   3143.256           0.0        17       520
  ...

...

aidaget LINAC//XCOR:BDES -DMICROS=LI10-LI10 -DUNITS=1-9999
  XCOR:LI10:200  0.0
  XCOR:LI10:201  0.0
  XCOR:LI10:202  0.0
  ...

Getting data from a number of devices at a time.

Combining a file of device names, or aidalist with a unix pipe, you can get a number of values at a time. For instance, get the Twiss parameters from the online model, of all the devices in a file. Say your devices were listed in a file (eg checkDevices27Oct2008.txt_Aida_NO), then you can get their values like this:

cat checkDevices27Oct2008.txt_Aida_NO | xargs -I {} -t aidaget "{}//twiss" -DMODE=5

The -t says echo what you're about to execute before executing it.

You can use output of aidalist directly to get values of a number of devices.
Combine aidalist with caget:

aidalist BPMS:LI27:%:X1 | xargs -I{} caget {} 
BPMS:LI27:201:X1               -0.210293 
BPMS:LI27:301:X1               0.0417948 
BPMS:LI27:401:X1               0.246912 
BPMS:LI27:501:X1               -0.252207 
BPMS:LI27:601:X1               -0.699057 
BPMS:LI27:701:X1               0.00149554 
BPMS:LI27:801:X1               0.161638 
BPMS:LI27:901:X1               -0.086897 

This example gets the twiss of all the XCORs in LI22. Note, we use the 2 argument form of aidalist to confine the the output to just the twiss attribute (rather than all the PVs of all the XCORs in LI22), then we select only the forst column of output (the device names), then call aidaget with is the device name and '//twiss' appended:

aidalist XCOR:LI22:% twiss | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I {} -t aidaget "{}//twiss" -DMODE=5

Setting Value: aidaset

The utility program named "aidaset" takes at least two mandatory arguments (the name of the target and the desired value), and several optional parameters control how it operates.

An AIDA data provider that supports setting values will accept either a single scalar or vector value, or a list of named scalar or vector values.  The EPICS channel access data provider is of the former sort, and the SLC Magnet server is of the latter.

NB: Presently, only the EPICS Channel Access and SLC Magnet data providers support write operations.

An example of setting a scalar EPICS process variable:

...

aidaset MAGNETSET//BDES -DMAGFUNC=TRIM /names XCOR:LI10:200 XCOR:LI10:201 /values 0.0123 -0.0321

Setting up on an AFS Node

If you are using these tools on lcls nodes (lcls-prod02, lcls-srv01 etc) then the following setup has been done for you. If you are using a SLAC AFS node, then do this setup to use the above tools:

source /afs/slac/g/cd/soft/dev/script/ENVS.csh
source /afs/slac/g/cd/soft/dev/script/aidaSetEnv.csh prod

You may wish to add these to your .cshrc.