
Help on Alarms

The Alarm Control dialogue box helps you to create,
refine, and delete alarms.

An alarm is a set of conditions (expressed in terms of keywords
and constants) which evaluate to True or False.  Each of these
conditions is associated with a message, optional Tcl code to
execute, and/or foreground/background colours for a WarningLight
meter, a severity, etc.

Permissible severity codes are I(nformational), W(arning),
E(rror), and F(atal).  Messages can be any text string, but
we suggest you avoid obscure punctuation characters.  Only
advanced users should consider the Tcl code option, except
for two canned routines:  logAlarm and mailAlarm <username>.
These two routines will log your alarm to the logfile, or
mail it to the designated user.

To use an alarm, you first have to name it and add the new name
to the set of known alarms.
Then, write a condition and add that to the list of conditions
for this alarm.  Reasonable default valus are provided as an
example.  You can keep adding conditions to the same alarm;
we recommend that you try to keep them somewhat related, rather
than having one alarm which represents several wildly different
conditions.

Once you have established an alarm, the name of that alarm
becomes something like a keyword;  you can associate the
alarm with a meter.  You can only associate alarms with
TextBox and WarningLight meters.

To associate the alarm with a meter, first set up the alarm,
then create a meter where the keyword is the alarm name.


