MIDAS does not seem to be consistent (or at least convenient) with how it
handles booleans in AJAX functions.

When you request an ODB value that is a boolean with AJAX call like

http://neut14.triumf.ca:8081/?cmd=jcopy&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys

then you get

{ "Hidden/last_written" : 1437065425, "Hidden" : false }

This seems correct, since the JSON convention has booleans encoded as true/false.

But this convention does not work when trying to set the boolean value. For instance

http://neut14.triumf.ca:8081/?cmd=jset&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys&value=true

does not set the variable to true. To make this work you need to use the
characters y/n

http://neut14.triumf.ca:8081/?cmd=jset&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys&value=y

I tested this with ajax/jset, but the same problem seems to occur when using the
javascript function ODBSet. The documentation doesn't say what sort of encoding
to use when using these functions, so I guess the idea is that these functions
use MIDAS encoding for booleans. But it seems to me that it would be more
convenient if jset/ODBSet allowed the option to use json/javascript encoding for
boolean values; or at least had that as a format option for jset/ODBSet.  That
way my javascript could look like

var mybool = true;
URI_command =
"?cmd=jset&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys&value=" + mybool;

instead of

var mybool = true;
URI_command = ""
if(mybool){
  URI_command =
"?cmd=jset&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys&value=y";
else
  URI_command =
"?cmd=jset&odb=/Equipment/DCRC/Common/Hidden&format=json-nokeys&value=n";


__________________________________________________________
Cross-posting from bitbucket issue tracker:

https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/issues/29/jset-odbset-using-true-false-for-booleans