It is legal in phoebus to have a bob file that defines a widget that omits most of the property tags. Any omitted tags will have some default value, which of course will not be available to a client that reads just the xml.
This is problematic for cases where we'd like to do things like check the state of a set of screens against some condition. Unless we happen to know what the default value of a particular property is for a particular widget, we cannot perform the check if the xml does not include the information.
Of course, I could open the editor, drag a widget, and see what the initial value is, but this is a brittle solution that is subject to breaking if the defaults ever change. It would be good if the default values for all properties for all widgets were in a machine readble (i.e. json or yaml) file with a defined schema somewhere that clients could read for a base state. Alternatively, it would be good if at least there were a automatically updated document that listed all of these default values in the documentation.
For context, I am developing a linter for phoebus screens: https://github.com/NSLS2/phoebuslint. It works pretty well but I am running into things like this:
Have a rule that checks if a widget is outside of the bounds of a screen. The screen is configured to be 400 x 600, but since 600 is the default width it is omitted in the xml. The linter doesn't know about this and defaults to 0, so every widget gets marked as out of bounds.
For now, I've hard coded the default value, but it would be great if we could put together a more robust solution.
It is legal in phoebus to have a bob file that defines a widget that omits most of the property tags. Any omitted tags will have some default value, which of course will not be available to a client that reads just the xml.
This is problematic for cases where we'd like to do things like check the state of a set of screens against some condition. Unless we happen to know what the default value of a particular property is for a particular widget, we cannot perform the check if the xml does not include the information.
Of course, I could open the editor, drag a widget, and see what the initial value is, but this is a brittle solution that is subject to breaking if the defaults ever change. It would be good if the default values for all properties for all widgets were in a machine readble (i.e. json or yaml) file with a defined schema somewhere that clients could read for a base state. Alternatively, it would be good if at least there were a automatically updated document that listed all of these default values in the documentation.
For context, I am developing a linter for phoebus screens: https://github.com/NSLS2/phoebuslint. It works pretty well but I am running into things like this:
For now, I've hard coded the default value, but it would be great if we could put together a more robust solution.