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Obviously this is no longer valid in Phoebus.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

• Testing:

  • The feature has automated tests
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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.