Vector Valued Channels Poorly Supported #27
Description
EPICS records can support values that are arrays (NELEM > 1) of a variety of types (floats, ints, string, enums, etc.). However, the only support for these array values is through MultiStringEvent. This means that every user of this library will have to manually convert the values back to the data type that matches the EPICS record type (DBR_DOUBLE => double).
myquery currently uses this library and passes this problem on to it's clients. We will have to coordinate with all down stream users and projects if we decide to correct this issue.
Comment from @slominskir on this issue.
Poking around upstream myapi docs, I see jmyapi was likely just following myapi as that upstream lib has only the MultiStringEvent as the only event that can be vector. In upstream myapi in order to have collection of floats you have to wrap in an Era object. Not clear why, that's just how it works. Didn't bother with Era object in jmyapi. https://devweb.acc.jlab.org/certified/doc/myapi/html/index.html
Not clear if we should try implementing the Era or DataSpan objects from the original C++ myapi.