Visualisation of real-time Front-End Software Architecture (FESA) developments at CERN

The Front-End Software Architecture (FESA) framework is the basis for most real-time software development for accelerator control at CERN. FESA designs are defined in an XML document which is validated against a schema to enforce framework constraints, and are used to automatically generate C++ boilerplate code in which the developer can then implement specific code. Design files can rapidly grow in complexity making the overview of the resulting system almost impossible to understand. One way to overcome this is to benefit from a graph-based representation of the design, with XML fragments summarized into logical blocks and association between the blocks depicted by arrows. As the intricacy of the graph is analogous to a potential complex design, it is also essential to provide an interactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) for parameterising and editing the graph generation in order to fine-tune a simpler and cleaner illustration of a FESA design. This paper describes such a GUI (FESA Graph Editor) and outlines how it benefits the design and documentation process of the FESA-design-document.