As browsing and tinkering in the 8.3 beta, I've come up with a couple lists
(Additional Known Issues??) that I've discovered
- Device Status currently doesn't exist
- Is this intended to be at the top of the page for a summary and a fly-in pane on the right for details?
- System performance trends not working?
- Exporting Named Queries all show the same generic name in export list
Suggested Improvements/Features
- Move scheduled backup settings to the backup/restore page (this seems like the natural place for this anyway)
- If moved here, add the ability to show all existing scheduled backup GWBK files in the destination folder and allow doing a direct restore from the page to restore from the selected backup after confirmations/warnings - This would be especially helpful if working remotely over a slow connection and needing to restore the latest automatic backup for some reason without having to upload it across a slow network
- Would it be possible to have a bottom "pane" or some other view to show the inheritance of projects visually in a tree form? (Would be extra nice if you could add projects under a parent from this view) Or even if the items were automatically sorted/ordered like this with insets from the parent to show inheritance more visually.
- Add status for user sources to show enabled/disabled and maybe even count of users/roles if supported for the various sources
- Multi-select for devices/databases should also allow bulk-disable/enable (Looks like this exists for modules already)
- Make more actions visible for each line/entry for devices, databases, user sources, etc rather than everything buried under a menu. I understand less used or more destructive actions being under the menu, but edit, details, and enable/disable would be helpful to just be a single-click away. Especially since all require saving/confirmation to make the change. I think it would help with the overall UX. Especially since those 3 are going to be the most commonly used actions. For other things like user sources, manage users would also be helpful.
- When duplicating any item, is it possible to automatically just fly out the edit pane after assigning a name since that's naturally what will happen probably 99% of the time (if not 100% of the time)
- OPC-UA Client Diagnostics tag/node list needs to be wider and paginated for better performance with large tag counts - having 60k tags brings the browser to its knees
- Would really like to see F2 rename images in the image management console
- Launcher project/gateway organization - I would really like to see more organization/sorting capabilities in the launchers. While most end users won't have a need for it, integrators or technicians who deal with a lot of gateways could definitely benefit from it (I know I could export and import the list, but built-in sorting of some sort to move them around or organize them into folders sorted alphabetically would be amazing!) I could then make folders for each client for example.
Improvements I like
- Liking the property filter for vision properties in place of the pre-selected filter for expert/basic/etc
- I like the added backup configs for settings that apply to the backup server. I currently don't have a use case for this, but can see it being useful for specific scenarios.
- Duplicating devices (and other configs) will definitely speed up adding similar devices, and hoping this works with the CirrusLink EFM drivers also.
- Really liking the gateway and client scripts being in the tree view now instead of inside a popup window.
- Like how things that were free text entry for like selecting the gateway scripting project, or gateway/designer roles are now selections to prevent making errors/typos
- Alarm metrics are great! Is there one for the root "folder" of the tag provider also?
- Multi-instance wizard looks way more powerful, but I haven't gotten a chance to test it out.
- Like that in image management you can now copy the mounted path for using it in Perspective
- The deep link and file association for launchers should help with distributing/sharing clients especially or even keeping my own bookmarks/shortcuts in my browser/file system to organize these better without even having to rely on the launcher as much. (Thinking of other engineers/programmers having to go to a customer site and just grabbing the
.designerfile and launching it to get access to the designer directly for example) - Memory tag persistence is something I hadn't heard mentioned before, but can also see this being useful for certain situations.
That's all for now as I haven't even begun to dig into scripting, etc. (Although I heard somewhere that all datasets are now iterable PyDatasets which is awesome and removes the need to convert between them all the time if I understand correctly.)
