Dear all,

I have a design question on building hierarchies in TANGO. Essentially I have the following inheritance:

1) Generic_DS
2) FPGA_DS (inherits from Generic_DS)
3) TPM_DS (inherits from FPGA_DS)

I have created 20 devices of type TPM_DS, and their device names are as follows:
/test/tpm_board/1
/test/tpm_board/2
…
/test/tpm_board/20

I now want to create a new device type called Station_DS with the following inheritance:

1) Generic_DS
2) Station_DS

The 'Station' will be responsible for operating on 10 TPM boards, so essentially I will have two Station devices. I am aware that this is possible with the use of Groups. However, I would like the Station (and the group) to persist the group in between server restarts for example. The current solution I have is a bit "hackish", I am memorizing a string with the list of TPM device names, which I then use to recreate the group on device initialization. But this is looking very flat, and not very hierarchical at all.

What is the proper TANGO pattern to do this? Essentially I want a system where there is a "master controller" at the top, which controls two stations, and each station controls ten TPM boards.

Thanks,
Andrea
Dr Andrea DeMarco, BSc (Hons) (Melita), MSc (Melita), DPhil (UEA)
Lecturer | Researcher
Department of Physics
Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy

Room 220, Maths and Physics Building
University of Malta, Msida MSD2080, MALTA