Run Control Panel

In this section:

The Run Control panel shows you the status of the different controlled applications, general information about them and their settings and allows you to send them expert commands (e.g., to kill a controller or restart an application).

Panel overview

The panel is divided into two parts. The left side of the panel shows the application tree, while the right side is composed out of two sub-panels (TestResults and Advanced) that will always contain information referred to the nodes select in the tree.

Run Control Tree Panel



The run control tree shows all the controlled applications for the partition you are running, as they are found in the configuration database. The Config package is used to access the database content.

The controller status

In the tree, the name of each controlled application is shown together with its actual status, which is retrieved from the Run Control Information Server. The following table reports all the possible states that a controller/application could reach.
REQUESTED The application is going to be started.
TERMINATING
The application is going to be terminated.
UP The application is running
ABSENT Application is not running.
NONE
Application is active, but no command has been sent to the children (only for the RootController NONE is a stable state).
INITIAL This state is reached just after initialization of the system. All applications have been started and established contact to their children (if any).
CONFIGURED
All controlled applications are configured.
CONNECTED All remote connections between endpoint applications are established (if appropriate). When this state has been reached run and configuration parameter can only be modified in a limited way. If this state is reached after the last step of the stop procedure, the PTs and SFOs are stopped.
RUNNING The system is data taking.
ROIBSTOPPED Part of stopping procedure: The RoI Builder is stopped.
DCSTOPPED
Part of stopping procedure: The Data Collection is stopped.
HLTSTOPPED
Part of stopping procedure: The HLT is stopped.
SFOSTOPPED Part of stopping procedure: The SFOs are stopped.
GTHSTOPPED Part of stopping procedure: The Monitoring Gatherers are stopped.
Since the run control tree may also contain applications which are not of the RunControlApplications kind (i.e., the are not aware of the run control FSM), for them only the REQUESTED, TERMINATING and UP states will be shown.

The name of the application is shown with a red color if it is in an error
, and its error status description can be seen as a tooltip. If the application is busy then a clock-like icon will be shown next to its name.

Sending commands to applications

You can select an application in the tree with the mouse. When the application is selected you can click on the right mouse button and a contextual menu will appear on the screen: the menu items can be used to send commands to the application.



The commands the user can send to the selected application are divided into four categories: MEMBERSHIP, RECOVERY, SEARCH and ADVANCED.

MEMBERSHIP commands

RECOVERY commands

The RESTART TTC PARTITION  command is enabled only for very specific applications, allowing a full restart and re-configuration of a detector (or parts of it). Such applications are shown in the Run Control tree with a turquoise background and and italic text.

SEARCH commands

ADVANCED commands


Often some menu items are disabled and cannot be clicked; this is normal because some commands are allowed only when the application is in a well defined state. The tree also offers a
multiple selection feature but for efficiency sake only nodes in the same state and with the same parent can be selected. When multiple applications are selected the commands from the contextual menu will be sent to all of them (i.e., it is possible to take out/in of membership several applications in a row).

The contextual menu will not be shown when the Igui is running in status display mode.

Additional Panels

The content shown by the the additional panels refers always to the selected node in the run control tree. The panels are the TestResults and the Advanced ones, and are grouped together in a tabbed pane.

  Advanced Panel


The Advanced sub panel offers the user an advanced interface to interact with the applications in the run control tree. It is made up of three different task panes which can be expanded or collapsed depending on the user needs: FSM Transition Commands, Advanced Commands and Application Information.

FSM Transition Commands

It shows the run control state of the selected application with the possibility of sending it commands to navigate up and down in the Run Control Finite State Machine (FSM). Its usage is really straightforward: the central column shows the current state of the application and the allowed states it could move to, while the right and left columns contains the action buttons the user can push to ask the application to change its state. In the picture the panel reports that the RootController is in the RUNNING state and it is allowed to move to the ROIBSTOPPED (via the STOPROIB command), CONNECTED (via the STOP command) or NONE (via the SHUTDOWN command) state.

If the selected application is not running or is not a run control state aware application, then the panel will report this status with a proper message. If the panel is shown while the selected application is changing its state, then the panel will be automatically updated to be consistent with the actual application status.

All this panel buttons will be disabled when the Igui runs in status display mode.

Advanced Commands

It makes possible to send additional commands to the selected application:
Please, note that any change in the publication rates will be reverted back to initial values very time the system is CONFIGURED.

Some commands will not be available for applications which are not state aware and when the Igui is executed in status display mode.

Application Information

It contains a table reporting general information about the selected application:

TestResults Panel

This panel reports the status of the tests performed by the Run Control system on various applications. If a segment's controller is selected in the Run Control tree, then the panel shows the status of the tests for all the applications in that segment. Each application is represented by a top-level node in the tree: the leaf nodes represent all the other components that have been tested because linked to the application itself (e.g., the computer where the application is running).



The following table reports all the possible states in which an application may be found.


The application is not yet tested or does not have any test associated to it

The tests on the application have been executed with success

Some test on the application failed
Some test on the application could not deliver a proper result in order to establish the application's status

Selecting and right-clicking on any component or component group will make a contextual menu to appear on the screen. The following table reports a description of all the allowed commands.

Test Test the selected component
Get Log
Display the test log for the component in a new window.


This is also the first panel which pops up when the Igui is started. If testing of any application fails, then the status of the whole infrastructure is considered as bad and the Igui does not switch to the main window and stops. In this case an additional buttons (Ignore and Continue, visible at the bottom of the panel) becomes available to the user: he/she can use it to ignore the reported errors and open the Igui main frame.

Panel Toolbar

The tool-bar at the bottom of the panel adds some extra features to help the user browsing the run control tree in a more efficient way.



Tree Search Interface
The purpose of the searchable interface is to make the seraching for a particular application easier:
  • Navigation feature - After user types in a text and  presses the up or down arrow buttons, only items that match the typed text will be selected. User can press the up and down buttons to quickly look at what those items are.
  • Select all feature - Pushing the button next to the key buttons the user can select all the occurrences matching the searching text (this feature may be  limited by the way the multiple selection model used by the run control tree).
  • Basic regular expression support - It allows '?' to match any character and '*' to match any number of characters. For example "a*c" will match "ac", "abc", "abbbc", or even "a b c" etc. "a?c" will only match "abc" or "a c".

Further Information

For more information on the run control, please see the Run Control twiki page.