I spoke to the guys at IA yesterday about this but figured I should put the request up here also in case someone has already figured out a way to do what I need.
Since we are looking at FPMI as an RSView replacement, I need to be able to do at least what RSView already does. One of the more important aspects of our MMI systems is Alarming.
In all of our systems, we have an alarm History page where the current alarms are displayed in ‘human terms’. i.e. we spell out the actual alarm, giving the operators enough information so that they can troubleshoot the problem.
i.e.
my internal tag name is [PLC]EStopAlm_ES202
the alarm message is Weigh Belt 100-CV-003 (Outside) Emergency Stop Activated Alarm
In everything I’ve seen, other than in FSQL email alerts, I can only seem to display the tagname in an alarm history screen. Obviously I can add a custom message in FSQL but there doesn’t seem to be any way to use this in FPMI.
Unfortunately, this will be a deal breaker in porting anything over to FPMI that we do in RSView if I can’t do something as simple as this.
What are others doing to get around this problem or am I really just missing something that I could simply do in another fashion?
If you made that the “state name” instead of the custom message, you would be able to get to it. Your particular example here seems like it would be perfectly suited to the state name- are there other situations that made you think state name wouldn’t work?
[quote=“Colby.Clegg”]If you made that the “state name” instead of the custom message, you would be able to get to it. Your particular example here seems like it would be perfectly suited to the state name- are there other situations that made you think state name wouldn’t work?
Regards,[/quote]
The only situation where it wouldn’t work is if I didn’t make the state name the text I wanted to see show up on my alarm screen!
lol
Works just fine this way and is exactly what I wanted… For some reason, I had the tag name in the state name field.
Thanks Colby… I must not have been as clear as I needed to be when I called in…
Well, from what I overheard, it sounded like you were trying to do something with dynamic values- like how in custom messages you can refer to properties of the alert. In the state name, you can’t do that- HOWEVER, the fact is, you have all of that information available to you in the status table, so you can concatenate together any message you want to display.
But anyhow, sounds like even that wasn’t necessary in this case. Glad that took care of what you needed.
[quote=“Colby.Clegg”]Well, from what I overheard, it sounded like you were trying to do something with dynamic values-
Regards,[/quote]
We don’t do a lot of dynamic values in alarm messages, the main thing was being able to display an ‘english’ version of the alarm to the operator. I don’t know how I missed that but with trying to take in everything about the software, I’m bound to glance over something.
Ignition’s alarming configuration is a bit more sophisticated along these lines. Along with all of the options you had before, you also can now override the alarm’s “path” to be more human-readable than the tag path, and you can attach free-form “notes” that can be displayed next to the alarm via the built-in Alert Sumary Table.