[BUG?] Session Custom properties randomly disappear

Ignition Perspective 8.1.33
Ran into this issue this morning and once about 6 weeks ago. Didn't ask anything about it then as it seemed like some one-off thing, but it happened again.

This morning, I came back into the office, I still had my designer instance open for my project, and it looked like it had some unsaved changes still pending to be saved (oops). I went ahead and saved it, and all seemed fine. I then opened a perspective session and tried to navigate around. I use a session property to handle some important navigation and utility functionality, so I noticed right away that I was having issues. I went back to the designer to check the session properties, as the last time I had this issue there were very similar symptoms. To my surprise, the session properties were still there it seemed. I then checked the logs, where I found some warnings that would line up with what I was expecting before.

It was strange to me that the perspective session was having trouble seeing the properties, but my designer session was not. After that, I restarted my designer session and lo-and-behold, the custom session properties had vanished.
image

Glancing at my logs, it doesn't look like the issue happened until after I saved the project, which makes me think there is some bug with saving in long-lived designer sessions (this session was probably open 24 hours and while my machine was asleep).

This is far from the first time I worked on designer sessions that had been open longer than this, but it may be the first time I saved changes that were pending from yesterday. Hard to know. Does anyone have any insight as to what might have caused this issue?

Luckily I had a backup that I was able to reimport the session properties with, but otherwise, I would have had to recreate everything from scratch.

If you let a workstation go to sleep while a designer is open, the gateway will kill off the designer's session eventually. When the designer wakes back up, it might not be current with anything else going on.

Not that this isn't a bug, but it seems like a dangerous practice to me.

2 Likes

Yes, my best solution at the moment is to just stop doing this. But figured I would mention it.

Yep this same behavior came back up today for me. I really need to switch these things over to pageVarMap() expression/script functions https://www.automation-pros.com/toolkit/doc/scripting.html#pagevarmap

I'm not familiar with this module or its functions. Is this meant to be some way to define property bindings through scripting?