Implement a dedicated action to open the data browser

[rjwills28]

In CS-Studio we used to have an ActionButton, which would run a script to open the data browser and plot specific PVs. This was done using an executeEclipseCommand, e.g.

ScriptUtil.executeEclipseCommand(command_id, ['pvnames', 'XXX:YYY'])

Obviously this is no longer valid in Phoebus.

I am aware that you can launch the data browser from the right click context menu but we would like to be able to be able to do this from a left click action and plot multiple PVs on the same plot. We could not find another suitable way to reproduce this behaviour (e.g. using a command or script).

Instead we thought it would be cleaner to provide a new action to open the data browser. The inputs include a single or list of PVs to plot as well as the timeframe to show. Potentially we could configure other parts of the data browser but this seemed like a good starting point.

We would appreciate any feedback you may have.

Checklist

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[georgweiss]

Works as expected.

Since in the data browser users may specify a formula, would it make sense to support it here as well? If yes, then parsing list of PVs would be affected as space chars may be used in formulas.

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
4 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud

[kasemir]

In your implementation, the OpenDataBrowserActionHandler in display-runtime uses classes from org.csstudio.trends.databrowser3.*.
In principle, it should be possible to open another application from the display without a direct dependency on that application.
For example, the “open file action” can already open any *.plt file using the generic application service.
“open file action” has no direct dependencies to any databrowser or PV table classes, but it can nevertheless open *.plt or *.pvs files via the application service, locating the appropriate application based on the *.plt or *.pvs file association.

[rjwills28]

Thanks for the idea @kasemir - that is a good point. I did try this by calling:

toolkit.openFile("pv://?pvname1&pvname2&app=databrowser");

Indeed it does work for opening the data browser showing the list of PVs, however it does not by default add the archive data source, which means that no data actually gets display. I also then can't configure the timeframe.