Conglomerate (aka Device) Data Type

MDSplus provides an conglomerate data type used for describing data acquisition or analysis devices. A device in MDSplus is implemented as a collection of adjacent tree nodes (or a conglomerate). The first node (located at the top of the node structure of this collection) contains a conglomerate data type. The conglomerate data type is a structure containing an image part, a model part, a name part and a qualifiers part. MDSplus implements device support by providing a mechanism for performing "methods" on devices. When a device method is performed on a device in an MDSplus tree either through an action or using the TCL command DO/METHOD, MDSplus invokes a procedure determined by the information in the head node of the device which contains a conglomerate data type. If there is an image part of the conglomerate structure, MDSplus will attempt to call a routine called "model-part"__"method" in the shared library specified by the image part. If the routine can not be found, MDSplus will try to invoke the TDI function called "model-part"__"method". Normally, the conglomerate data is loaded into the head node of a device automatically when you add it to the tree so you may not need to access this data type directly.

The name part of the device is often a reference to a sub node of the device which contains the data acquisition module identification such as the CAMAC module name. This portion of the device is not used during method invokation and was simply added as a convenience in building tools for gathering information about device definitions in a tree. The qualifiers part of the structure could be used by device support for making variant device implementations. This field along with the name field are generally not used any longer.

The following shows an example of a conglomerate data type.

TCL> set tree subtree
TCL> dir/full a14

\SUBTREE::TOP

 :A14
      Status: on,parent is on, usage device,readonly
      Data inserted:  3-NOV-1994 14:43:55    Owner: [100,100]
      Dtype: DTYPE_CONGLOM         Class: CLASS_R             Length: 102 bytes
      Model element: 1

Total of 1 node.
TCL> decompile a14
Build_Conglom("MIT$DEVICES", "A14", *, *)
TCL> do/method a14 store

In the above example we open the subtree (sample tree) and display the characteristics and contents of the A14 node. It contains a DTYPE_CONGLOM data record and is the first element of a conglomeration of nodes. The conglomerate data structure has "MIT$DEVICES" for the image part and "A14" for the model part and the name and qualifiers parts are empty. When the store method is performed on this node (or any node which is part of this device), MDSplus looks for a routine called a14__store in the shared library called MIT$DEVICES and if found calls it with the node number of the head node and the method string. If it cannot find this routine or image, it will attempt to invoke the a14__store tdi function with the same arguments.

The following table lists some of the functions available for creating and accessing conglomerate data types: