Recently I was trying to read sequencer scripts written by a previous student, and realized it would be easier to 
quickly read/skim sequencer code with some form of syntax highlighting. I've been using Visual Studio Code as my 
editor, so I made myself an extension for VS Code that provides basic syntax highlighting (with help from 
ChatGPT-3.5). It's good enough for my purposes, but is missing some features you'd expect for full language 
support. This got me wondering - does anything like this already exist, perhaps with more complete support?

If it doesn't already exist, and if there is interest, I could to publish mine 
to vscode's "Extension Marketplace" for easy installations (I'd also welcome contributions for 
more features). For now, I've installed it on my computer directly from the .vsix file, which I've put on my own 
github at https://github.com/maia-hw/midas-sequencer-support . There is also a readme with screenshot showing what scripts 
will look like with the highlighting

> Hi,
> 
> I have just installed Midas and set-up the ODB for a SuperCDMS test-facility (on
> a SL6.7 machine). All works fine except that I receive the following error message:
> 
> [mserver,ERROR] [odb.c:944:db_validate_db,ERROR] Warning: database data area is
> 100% full
> 
> Which is puzzling for the following reason:
> 
> -> I have created the ODB with: odbedit -s 4194304
> -> Checking the size of the .ODB.SHM it says: 4.2M
> -> When I save the ODB as .xml and check the file's size it says: 1.1M
> -> When I start odbedit and check the memory usage issuing 'mem', it says: 
> ...
> Free Key area: 1982136 bytes out of 2097152 bytes
> ...
> Free Data area: 2020072 bytes out of 2097152 bytes
> Free: 1982136 (94.5%) keylist, 2020072 (96.3%) data
> 
> So it seems like nearly all memory is still free. As a test I created more
> instances of one of our front-ends and checked 'mem' again. As expected the free
> memory was decreasing. I did this ten times in fact, reaching
> 
> ...
> Free Key area: 1440976 bytes out of 2097152 bytes
> ...
> Free Data area: 1861264 bytes out of 2097152 bytes
> Free: 1440976 (68.7%) keylist, 1861264 (88.8%) data
> 
> So I could use another >20% of the database data area, which is according to the
> error message 100% (resp. >95%) full. Am I misunderstanding the error message?
> I'd appreciate any comments or ideas on that subject!
> 
> Thanks, Belina

This is an old post, but I encountered the same error message recently and was looking for a 
solution here. Here's how I solved it, for anyone else who finds this: 
The size of .ODB.SHM was bigger than the maximum ODB size (4.2M > 4194304 in Belina's case). For us, 
the very large odb size was in error and I suspect it happened because we forgot to shut down midas 
cleanly before shutting the computer down. Using odbedit to load a previously saved copy of the ODB 
did not help me to get .ODB.SHM back to a normal size. Following the instructions on the wiki for 
recovery from a corrupted odb, 
https://daq00.triumf.ca/MidasWiki/index.php/FAQ#How_to_recover_from_a_corrupted_ODB, (odbinit with --cleanup option) should 
work, but didn't for me. Unfortunately I didn't save the output to figure out why. My solution was to manually delete/move/hide 
the .ODB.SHM file, and an equally large file called .ODB.SHM.1701109528, then run odbedit again and reload that same saved copy of my ODB. 
Manually changing files used by mserver is risky - for anyone who has the same problem, I suggest trying odbinit --cleanup -s 
<yoursize> first.

> If there's some template for writing a client to access event data, that would be 
> very useful (and you can probably just ignore the context I gave below in that 
> case).
> 
> 
> Some context:
> 
> Quite a while ago, I wrote the attached "data pipeline" client whose job was to 
> listen for events, copy their data, and pipe them to a python script. I believe I 
> just stole bits and pieces from mdump.cxx to accomplish this. Later I wrote the 
> attached wrapper class "MidasConnector.cpp" and a main.cpp to generalize
> data_pipeline.cxx a bit. There were a lot of iterations to the code where I had the 
> below problems; so don't take the logic in the attached code as the exact code that 
> caused the issues below.
> 
> However, I'm unable to resolve a couple issues:
> 
> 1. If a timeout is set, everything will work until that timeout is reached. Then 
> regardless of what kind of logic I tried to implement (retry receiving event, 
> disconnect and reconnect client, etc.) the client would refuse to receive more data.
> 
> 2. When I ctrl-C main, it hangs; this is expected because it's stuck in a while 
> loop. But because I can't set a timeout I have to ctrl-C twice; this would 
> occasionally corrupt the ODB which was not ideal. I was able to get around this with 
> some impractical solution involving ncurses I believe.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Jack

midas/examples/lowlevel/consume.cxx might be what you're looking for, but I think all 
you're missing is a call to cm_yield() in your loop, so your midas client doesn't get 
killed when the timeout is reached (and also so you can act on shutdown requests from 
midas)

Something like 
      int status = cm_yield(100);
      if (status == SS_ABORT || status == RPC_SHUTDOWN)
         break;

There might be a recommended way to handle the ctrl-c and disconnect from the ODB, but 
off the top of my head I don't remember it. 

Also check out Ben's new(ish) python library, midas/python/examples/event_receiver.py 
might be a much easier solution. And you can use the context manager, which will take 
care of safely disconnecting from midas after you ctrl-C.

> Hello,
> 
> I've noticed that SC FEs that use the TMFE class with midas-2022-05-c often report errors when calling TMFE:Sleep().
> The error is :
> 
> [tmfe.cxx:1033:TMFE::Sleep,ERROR] select() returned -1, errno 22 (Invalid argument).
> 
> This seems to happen in two different ways:
> 
> 1. Error being reported repeatedly
> 2. Occasional single errors being reported
> 
> When the first of these presents, we typically restart the FE to "solve" the problem.
> Case 2. is typically ignored.
> 
> The code in question is:
> 
> void TMFE::Sleep(double time)
> {
>    int status;
>    fd_set fdset;
>    struct timeval timeout;
>       
>    FD_ZERO(&fdset);
>       
>    timeout.tv_sec = time;
>    timeout.tv_usec = (time-timeout.tv_sec)*1000000.0;
> 
>    while (1) {
>       status = select(1, &fdset, NULL, NULL, &timeout);
> #ifdef EINTR
>       if (status < 0 && errno == EINTR) {
>          continue;
>       }
> #endif
>       break;
>    }
>       
>    if (status < 0) {
>       TMFE::Instance()->Msg(MERROR, "TMFE::Sleep", "select() returned %d, errno %d (%s)", status, errno, strerror(errno));
>    }
> }
> 
> So it looks like either file descriptor of the timeval struct must have a problem.
> From some reading it seems that invalid timeval structs are often caused by one or both
> of tv_sec or tv_usec not being set. In the code above we can see that both appear to be
> correctly set initially.
> 
> From the select() man page I see:
> 
> RETURN VALUE
>        On success, select() and pselect() return the number of file descriptors contained in
>        the three returned descriptor sets (that is, the total number of bits that are set in
>        readfds,  writefds,  exceptfds).  The return value may be zero if the timeout expired
>        before any file descriptors became ready.
> 
>        On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error; the file descriptor
>        sets are unmodified, and timeout becomes undefined.
> 
> The second paragraph quoted from the man page above would indicate to me that perhaps the
> timeout needs to be reset inside the if block. eg:
> 
>       if (status < 0 && errno == EINTR) {
>          timeout.tv_sec = time;
>          timeout.tv_usec = (time-timeout.tv_sec)*1000000.0;
>          continue;
>       }
> 
> Please note that I've only just briefly looked at this and was hoping someone more
> familiar with using select() as a way to sleep() might be better able to understand
> what is happening.
> 
> I wonder also if now that midas requires stricter/newer c++ standards if there maybe
> some more straightforward method to sleep that is sufficiently robust and portable.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Nick.

I had the same error a few months ago, though I wasn't using a tagged release. It happened because I was calling TMFE::Sleep() 
with a negative time. If your issues were caused by the same reason, TMFE::Sleep() can handle negative times since commit 
591f78f (https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/591f78f52893d5ffd64bf4e52a1daac537ebd672).

Early in my debugging, I did come to the same conclusions you did, and actually tried a similar solution the one you suggested. 
This was a few months ago and I didn't write down what happened, but I believe it didn't work because in my case the errno was 
something other than EINTR, and/or the timeval was still an invalid argument for sleep because the timeout was still negative. I 
never followed it up because I was able to fix my problem by fixing my frontend.

> While executing "make install" under MacOS 10.4.7, you may encounter errors about "dio". It is the 
> problem of "Makefile". I did some change to it and attach the diff file here.

Thank you very much for your instructions for installing Midas on MacOSX.
I followed your instructions to change the Makefile but I still get the following error message:

... 
... Installing programs and utilities to /usr/local/bin
... 
install: darwin/bin/lazylogger exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mchart exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mcnaf exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mdump exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/melog exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mhdump exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mhist exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mhttpd exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mlogger exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mlxspeaker exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mserver exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mstat exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/mtape exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/odbedit exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/odbhist exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/stripchart.tcl exists but is not a directory
install: darwin/bin/webpaw exists but is not a directory
make: *** [install] Error 71

Could you help me solve this problem? Thank you in advance =)

I forgot to mention that, the following (and similar) lines:
           install -v -D -m 755 $$file $(SYSBIN_DIR)/`basename $$file` ; \
are changed into
           install -v -d -m 755 $$file $(SYSBIN_DIR)/`basename $$file` ; \

since -D is an illegal option for install. I am not sure whether -D in Linux means the same thing for -d in MacOSX install. 


> > While executing "make install" under MacOS 10.4.7, you may encounter errors about "dio". It is the 
> > problem of "Makefile". I did some change to it and attach the diff file here.
> 
> Thank you very much for your instructions for installing Midas on MacOSX.
> I followed your instructions to change the Makefile but I still get the following error message:
> 
> ... 
> ... Installing programs and utilities to /usr/local/bin
> ... 
> install: darwin/bin/lazylogger exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mchart exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mcnaf exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mdump exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/melog exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mhdump exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mhist exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mhttpd exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mlogger exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mlxspeaker exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mserver exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mstat exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/mtape exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/odbedit exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/odbhist exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/stripchart.tcl exists but is not a directory
> install: darwin/bin/webpaw exists but is not a directory
> make: *** [install] Error 71
> 
> Could you help me solve this problem? Thank you in advance =)

Thank you for your help =)

Since SYSBIN_DIR is defined as /usr/local/bin in the Makefile and it exists in my computer, so I deleted the -D in the Makefile and tried to "make install" again and the 
error message becomes:

... 
... Installing programs and utilities to /usr/local/bin
... 
/bin/sh: -c: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file
make: *** [install] Error 2

Can anyone help me solve this problem? 


> > I forgot to mention that, the following (and similar) lines:
> >            install -v -D -m 755 $$file $(SYSBIN_DIR)/`basename $$file` ; \
> > are changed into
> >            install -v -d -m 755 $$file $(SYSBIN_DIR)/`basename $$file` ; \
> > 
> > since -D is an illegal option for install. I am not sure whether -D in Linux means the same thing for -d in MacOSX install. 
> 
> -D under linux means:
> 
>        -D     create all leading components of DEST except the last, then
>               copy SOURCE to DEST; useful in the 1st format
> 
> This means if you install the first time, and eithe SYSBIN_DIR or `basename is not existing, it will be created on-the-fly from
> the install program. If OSX does not support this, you somehow have to crate these subdirectories manually.

I would like to store the address of 1-Wire temperature sensors in a device
driver. However, the supportet data types (as definded around
include/midas.h:311) do not foresee a type large enough.

Is there a good reason against this?

I know that other experiments use this kind of sensor, how do you store the
addresses? I've noticed that most of the address is just zeroes, but I wouldn't
like to store just half the address, assuming that half the address is always
zeroes.

Asume you have a variable foo and a link bar -> foo. When you go to the ODB in
mhttpd, click "Delete" and select bar, it actually deletes foo. bar stays,
stating "<cannot resolve link>". Trying the same in odbedit with rm gives the
expected result (bar is gone, foo is still there).

I'm on the develop branch.

Hi,
I am trying to set up virtual history events following
https://midas.triumf.ca/MidasWiki/index.php/History_System#Virtual_History_Event 

Trying it the first way, using the following setup:
Key name                        Type    #Val  Size  Last Opn Mode Value
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Links                           DIR
    dirlink -> External/dir     KEY     1     12    >99d 0   RWD  <subdirectory>


Key name                        Type    #Val  Size  Last Opn Mode Value
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
External                        DIR
    dir                         DIR
        foo                     FLOAT   1     4     16s  0   RWD  12.5


Then I get the following error message:
==================== History link "dirlink", ID 28150  =======================
[Logger,ERROR] [mlogger.cxx:4942:open_history,ERROR] History event dirlink has
no variables in ODB


Trying the second way, I set up the following:
Key name                        Type    #Val  Size  Last Opn Mode Value
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Links                           DIR
    dir                         DIR
        testlink -> External/foo
                                FLOAT   1     4     8m   0   RWD  5.2

Key name                        Type    #Val  Size  Last Opn Mode Value
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
External                        DIR
    foo                         FLOAT   1     4     6m   0   RWD  5.2


Starting mlogger in verbose mode yields the following error:
==================== History link "dir", ID 28150  =======================
[Logger,ERROR] [mlogger.cxx:4935:open_history,ERROR] History link
/History/Links/dir/testlink is invalid
Error in history system, aborting startup.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or just a case of PEBCAK.

Finally, to set the update period, do I need entries in /history/links periods
with the tag name? Is there a way to only write them in the history file when
they change? I want to use the virtual history events for measurements I get
from external scripts, some periodic, some manual.

Thanks

If you run an external script anyway, you can also call "odbedit -c alarm" to
reset all alarms. Or you could try to set the "Triggered" entry of that certain
alarm to 0 (again, with odbedit), that could also work.

Hey,

while trying to compile Midas under openSUSE 15.0 with mysql support, I was
running into the problem that somehow the mysql header file my_global.h is not
included in the packages. This might be a bug that concerns the suse developers
more, but is it actually needed? Compilation worked fine with the include line
commented out.

If it's not needed, I would like to suggest to remove line 735 of
src/history_schema.cxx (where it's included)

Cheers
Lukas

mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.2.22-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using  EditLine wrapper
Also, all mariadb development packages are installed

Thanks!

Hi,
the subject line describes the project already
Suppose you have a file foo.msl. Somewhere in the file, you have the line 
INCLUDE bar.msl

Once you click save in the sequencer page, mhttpd crashes:
$ mhttpd
free(): double free detected in tcache 2
[1]    27590 abort (core dumped)  mhttpd


GDB helps shed some light on the problem:

#0  0x00007ffff76b057f in raise () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x00007ffff769a895 in abort () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#2  0x00007ffff76f39d7 in __libc_message () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#3  0x00007ffff76fa2ec in malloc_printerr () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#4  0x00007ffff76fbdf5 in _int_free () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#5  0x00000000004b8b41 in mxml_parse_entity (buf=buf@entry=0x7fffffffc2c8,
file_name=file_name@entry=0x7fffffffc710
"/home/luk/packages/mutrig_daq/online/foo.xml",
            error=error@entry=0x7fffffffcd24 "XML read error in file
\"/home/luk/packages/mutrig_daq/online/foo.xml\", line 2: bar.msl.xml is
missing", error_size=error_size@entry=256,
                error_line=error_line@entry=0x7fffffffce24) at ../mxml/mxml.c:1996
#6  0x00000000004b966d in mxml_parse_file
(file_name=file_name@entry=0x7fffffffc710
"/home/luk/packages/mutrig_daq/online/foo.xml",
            error=error@entry=0x7fffffffcd24 "XML read error in file
\"/home/luk/packages/mutrig_daq/online/foo.xml\", line 2: bar.msl.xml is
missing", error_size=error_size@entry=256,
                error_line=error_line@entry=0x7fffffffce24) at ../mxml/mxml.c:2041
#7  0x000000000041d9c2 in init_sequencer () at src/mhttpd.cxx:14321
#8  0x000000000040c2b6 in main (argc=<optimized out>, argv=<optimized out>) at
src/mhttpd.cxx:18028

Cheers
Lukas

P. S. This problem reminds me of the old joke: A man goes to his doctor and says
"Doc, it hurts when I do this" to which the doctor replies "Then don't do that".
However, I think, mhttpd should not crash even if you're not supposed to include
non-existent scripts in msequencer.

Hi, 
I am missing a few features. Do any of the following exist and I have just
overlooked them?

- Arithmetics:
    SET foo, 2
    SET bar, 2
    SET FOOBAR, $foo + $bar
    -> FOOBAR is 2, not 4

- Vectors/arrays
    As far as I understand, "SET" only allows for single variables and no 
    "scripting" in variable names, i. e. doing something like the following
    scripted: 
    SET var_1, 0
    SET var_2, 0
    ...
    LOOP n, 10
        ...
        IF something
            SET var_${n}, 1
        ENDIF 
    
    The only way I could think of doing something similar is via the ODB.
    I don't know if it's good practice to fill the ODB with variables like this.

- Loading scripts at run time (see other bug)
    That would allow for script manipulation, even though it's kind of dirty, it
    might be useful in some cases.

- Obtaining results from external scripts
    A way to pass things from external scripts would be the solution to all
    problems. Something that is not implemented could be done in a bash or
    python script instead. 

Cheers
Lukas

Thank you two!

Actually, both solutions would allow me to fix my problem and I can see use cases for both. Having everything web-based is useful in bigger setups. However, in a testbeam environment, a python script is probably the more straight-forward solution. This gives access to the whole system of ones DAQ PC for whatever tricks one would like to perform.

Konstantin, would you mind resurrecting and sharing the python code? So far, my workaround is to call odbedit, which is not ideal for many reasons.

Cheers
Lukas

Dear Stefan,

another thing which does not work is the comparison of floating point numbers.

The script:

IF 1.1 > 1.0 
    MESSAGE "foo" 
ENDIF 

Produces an error "Invalid number in comparison". This is due to isdigit() being used to find the numerical values in the condition at progs/msequencer.cxx:343.

Would it be possible to add something like the following?
 343 if (!isdigit(value1_var[i]) && value1_var[i] != '.')
 344          break;
Which would only leave open a problem with some string like "2.3.4"

Cheers
Lukas

Can you post the exact command that cmake executes to link sc_fe_mini (with make VERBOSE=1)?

I have noticed similar linking problems that depended on the order when linking. In my case, it 
compiled when "-lpthread -lutil -lrt" were at the end of the command, but not before mfe.o and 
libmidas.a. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to tell cmake the "correct" order of the link 
libraries.

Maybe this can be fixed by adding midas as a subdirectory in your cmake project and just linking 
against the "mfe" target instead of libmfe.a.

> In any case, we are setup for an eventual collision between MIDAS CFLAGS (-std=gnu++11) and ROOT CFLAGS (-std=something else).

Are there good reasons to not compile MIDAS with set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 14)? So far this was an easier "fix" for me than to recompile ROOT with c++11.