Event GUI Overview

The eventGUI is intended as a replacement for the Python-based acseventbrowser, which has shown stability problems in the past. The new, Eclipse RCP (Java)-based eventGUI does not include all the functionality that was offered by its predecessor, but should be easier to use and understand.
The main Event GUI screen, with the Event Detail View displayed in the lower right-hand quadrant.

There are three principal views:

Service Summary View

This hierarchical view displays high-level information concerning each of the instances of the CORBA Notify Service that are currently running under ACS. At the time of writing, these are:
  1. Default Notify Service: used by subsystems for event communication
  2. Logging Notify Service: currently carries logs across the network
  3. Archiving Notify Service: carries those BACI properties for which it is enabled in the (TM)CDB
The leaves of the explorer-like tree show the number of consumers and the number of suppliers for each of these Services. When monitoring is enabled (right-click anywhere on the View and select "Start monitoring"), the recent (within the last 10 seconds) increase or decrease in the number of suppliers/consumers will be shown next to the totals.

Channel Tree View

Event List View

Unless filtering (see below) is active, this View displays a scrolling list of events, updated roughly once per second. A handful of high-level fields are shown for each event, namely:
  1. Timestamp:
  2. Event source:
  3. Number of events received for this channel:
  4. Event type:
  5. Number of events of this type received:
Available memory is checked periodically, and when a low-water mark is reached, the oldest events will be deleted from the list. Note the contrast between this behavior and that of jlog, which can buffer log records to disk.

Filtering

This facility, most assuredly in a preliminary, experimental state, can select which incoming events to display based on their type. Entering any part of a regular expression into the box above the list will show only those events whose type is matched by the expression, and only those which arrive after the filter is set. To resume full event display, the filter text box should be cleared; again this is effective only for events arriving after the filter box has been cleared. Clicking on an event in this view will open the Event Detail View.

Event Detail View

This view (still somewhat of a work in progress) displays the decoded contents of the selected event. In the case of an event that contains one or more arrays, only the first 5 elements of the array will be shown. Note that for large events, e.g.. with thousand-element arrays, display of the event may take some time, as indicated by a rotating cursor.