Layer 4 of the condition-Quality chain (#477 -> #478). #478 gave a scripted
condition the worst quality of its input tags, but only for inputs whose driver
PUBLISHES a Bad data change. A poll driver whose device goes unreachable
publishes nothing — it raises ConnectivityChanged(false) and goes silent — so
the engine held its last Good value, WorstInputStatus stayed Good, and worse,
AreInputsReady stayed true, so the predicate went on evaluating a stale value
after the source had died.
`DriverHostActor.FanCommsLossToDependencyMux` pushes a synthetic
BadNoCommunication with a null value into the dependency mux for every value ref
the disconnected driver owns.
The issue asked for a driver -> all-tag-refs map to be built for this. It
already exists: `_nodeIdByDriverRef`, keyed (DriverInstanceId, RawPath) and
rebuilt from the composition on every apply. Alarm-bearing tags live in the
separate `_alarmNodeIdByDriverRef` and are deliberately excluded — a native
condition is not a mux value and takes the Part 9 quality path instead.
Nothing is pushed on reconnect, deliberately: publishing Good would assert a
value quality this actor has not observed. Recovery rides the driver's own
republish, and the mechanism was verified rather than assumed — the
Connected -> Reconnecting edge calls DetachSubscription, which nulls the
subscription handle, so the reconnect's ResubscribeDesired builds a FRESH
subscription whose PollGroupEngine initial push runs with forceRaise: true.
Without that detach the poll engine would compare against its retained
LastValues, see an unchanged value, raise nothing, and strand these refs Bad
forever — the value-dedup trap that bit the v3 Batch 4 virtual-tag reassert.
Closes#478 Finding 3, which the above depends on. WorstInputStatus skipped
every input whose VALUE was null as "no data yet" — and Bad-with-no-value is
exactly the shape a comms-lost driver produces, so the skip was hiding the case
that matters most; without this half the fan-out above would be silently inert.
The upstream source now stamps a never-pushed path BadWaitingForInitialData —
the honest Part 4 code for that state — and the engine skips that specific code
rather than every null value.
Deleting the null-skip outright is the obvious fix and is wrong in the other
direction: it makes every not-yet-published input drag its condition Bad at
deploy, flooding the quality path with load-time annotations, which is what the
skip existed to prevent. Both mistakes are pinned by a test pair that goes red
under the opposite error, and both were falsified by reverting the production
code:
old null-skip restored -> A_pushed_Bad_carrying_no_value RED
null-skip deleted outright -> An_input_that_was_never_pushed RED
fan-out call removed -> the three DriverHostActor tests RED (1 of 7)
The never-pushed test was vacuous on first writing and is worth recording: the
quality bucket only emits on CHANGE, so the load-time evaluation is the one that
flashes Bad, and subscribing to OnEvent after LoadAsync made the assertion
unfalsifiable — it passed against the broken behaviour. It now subscribes first.
`FakeUpstream.ReadTag` returned 0x80340000 (BadNotConnected) for an unset path,
a different Bad code from production's placeholder. Harmless while any Bad
behaved alike; load-bearing now, so it is aligned and pinned by a reflection
guard asserting the engine's private constant agrees with what the production
source stamps.
Behaviour change to weigh, flagged in the issue and confirmed: virtual tags
computed from a comms-lost input now go Bad too. That follows from using the
shared mux and reads as correct, but it is broader than scripted alarms.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015p7wGqy3YpZNCpDzTpGMKo
Joseph Doherty
c81cef39f5