282-standardise-handling-of-read-config-and-hinted-signals-for-standarddetector

[ZohebShaikh]

No description provided.

[coretl]

Could: be positional args

Suggested change

	plugins: Sequence[NDArrayBaseIO] | None = None,
	*plugins: NDArrayBaseIO,

[coretl]

Thinking about this more, please can we

• Only parse plugins with stuff that looks like XML
• We can then ditch the error catching

Suggested change

	try:
	for plugin in self._plugins:
	tree = ET.parse((await plugin.nd_attributes_file.get_value()))
	root = tree.getroot()
	for child in root:
	datakey = child.attrib["name"]
	self._datasets.append(
	HDFDataset(
	datakey,
	f"/entry/instrument/NDAttributes/{datakey}",
	(),
	convert_ad_dtype_to_np(
	ADBaseDataType((child.attrib.get("datatype", None)))
	),
	multiplier,
	)
	)
	except ET.ParseError:
	raise ValueError("Error parsing XML")
	for plugin in self._plugins:
	maybe_xml = await plugin.nd_attributes_file.get_value()
	# This is the check that ADCore does to see if it is an XML string
	# rather than a filename to parse
	if "<Attributes>" in maybe_xml:
	root = ET.parse(maybe_xml).getroot()
	for child in root:
	datakey = child.attrib["name"]
	self._datasets.append(
	HDFDataset(
	datakey,
	f"/entry/instrument/NDAttributes/{datakey}",
	(),
	convert_ad_dtype_to_np(
	ADBaseDataType((child.attrib.get("datatype", None)))
	),
	multiplier,
	)
	)

[coretl]

Please can we have some tests for these functions? I would like to see the deleted test recreated using the new functions

[coretl]

This is not quite right, so I went reading the areaDetector code. Turns out to be more complicated than I thought.

There are 3 cases to consider:

• NDAttributeParam with type DOUBLE, INT, INT64, STRING
• NDAttributePV with type DBR_NATIVE
• NDAttributePV with type DBR_LONG, DBR_STRING, ...

I think we can solve with the following lookup:

_ndattribute_to_ad_datatype = {
    "FLOAT": ADBaseDataType.Float64,
    "DBR_DOUBLE: ADBaseDataType.Float64,
    ...
}
if datatype in ["STRING", "DBR_STRING"]:
    np_datatype = "s40"
elif datatype == "DBR_NATIVE":
    raise ValueError("Don't support DBR_NATIVE yet")
else:
    ad_datatype = _ndattribute_to_ad_datatype[datatype]
    np_datatype = convert_ad_dtype_to_np(datatype)

[ZohebShaikh]

I used this comment to figure out the datatype https://github.com/areaDetector/ADCore/blob/1a9135976b4bc75bfdfe1ed7516a3e7d29e08e6b/ADApp/ADSrc/asynNDArrayDriver.cpp#L263

[ZohebShaikh]

I have included tests here that are equivalent to the ones I have removed.