pvAccess is a computer communications protocol for control systems, and is a central component of the EPICS software toolkit. pvAccessCPP is the name of the software module which contains the C++ implementation of pvAccess.

Consult the documents in the documentation directory, in particular

• pvAccessCPP.html
• RELEASE_NOTES.md

Also see the EPICS Version 4 website

The pvAccessCPP requires recent versions of the following software:

1. EPICS Base (v3.14.12.3 or later)
2. EPICS4 pvCommonCPP (4.1.1 or later)
3. EPICS4 pvDataCPP (5.0.2 or later)

Building uses the make utility and the EPICS base build system.

The build system needs the location of the prerequisites, e.g. by placing the lines of the form

PVCOMMON = /home/install/epicsV4/pvCommonCPP
PVDATA = /home/install/epicsV4/pvDataCPP
EPICS_BASE = /home/install/epics/base

pointing to the locations in a file called RELEASE.local in the configure directory or the parent directory of pvAccessCPP.

With this in place, to build type make

make

To perform a clean build type

make clean uninstall

To run the unit tests type

make runtests

For more information on the EPICS build system consult the Application Development guide.

This section describes how you can test and demo pvAccess.

A test server is shipped with pvAccessCPP. See the file pvAccessCPP/DEMO for examples of usage. To run the server, write a setup script like that above, and then use it prior to executing "runTestServer":

$ ./runTestServer 
Starting pvAccess C++ test server...
VERSION : pvAccess Server v4.1.1
PROVIDER_NAMES : local
BEACON_ADDR_LIST : 
AUTO_BEACON_ADDR_LIST : 1
BEACON_PERIOD : 15
BROADCAST_PORT : 5076
SERVER_PORT : 5075
RCV_BUFFER_SIZE : 16384
IGNORE_ADDR_LIST: 
STATE : INITIALIZED

Then, another window, you can go through the demos in pvAccessCPP/DEMO. For example:

$ ./bin/$EPICS_HOST_ARCH/pvget testValue
testValue                     0