I need a simple bar graph, each bar represents a thermocouple and I need each bar to represent it's live temperature. I found the thermometer display object that seems to do exactly what I want each bar in my graph or chart to do. However I'd also like this to look presentable. As it stands right now, the number at the bottom of the thermometer is perfect, I'd just prefer to not have the round mercury ball on the bottom, I found out how to get rid of the thermometer perimeter (stroke width), and I'd also like to get rid of the legend as I'm going to have several of these. I found a progress bar which would also be perfect, but I can't get it to change color as the thermometer has intervals and my attempt to add them to the progress bar failed. Any help would be great.
The easiest way to do this is to take a flex control and put a label in it. Give the label a background color and set it to fill based on a %. So basically the label becomes your bar and the % it fills is handled by the flex.
You can display the number on the label also btw.
Edit:
I build a demo example for someone in this thread.
You can add this to Steve's flex label bar by setting the color to an expression binding.
Same with the progress bar, if you set the color to an expression binding you can have the color change depending on the value range.
You might also consider the Moving analog indicator, which features a vertical bar with color intervals out of the box, but sacrifices the thermometer look in favor of something more like a linear gauge.
Thank you Steve and Felipe. I now have two options that work pretty well as a bar for the bar graph. Any quick solutions on creating the graph itself? Right now I'm thinking I'm going to have to free hand it all. It would be nice if I could group everything but since that's not an option, I'm struggling to think of a way to do it in a flex container. Any ideas would be great. Right now this screen/dashboard is going to be a static 1920-1080 screen so I'm not sure I'll need to grow or shrink the graph. Nothing else on the dashboard is setup that way. Thanks.
I guess I missed the part where you wanted to make an actual bar chart.
Yet another option to make a bar chart is to use the XY Chart with render set to column. It even has a config called heatRules that changes the color of the bar using a gradient. (If you want to stick to discrete intervals you'd have to hack it, probably involving a series per thermocouple and a binding on the column.fill.color property for each one.)
Also for any of the above you'd need to write logic to package your live thermocouple readings as a dataset. Phil's Automation Professionals' Integration Toolkit Module would probably come in handy, or you could script it.
If you want to stick to individual bars you also have some options:
- Flex container (if you have a fixed set of thermocouples that you don't plan to change much). You'd make a row of bars. If the bars need labels you'd either make the bar+label an embedded view (easier to keep consistent), or play with nested flex containers.
- Flex repeater, similar to the flex container but 1. Requires embedded views and 2. allows you to set up instances dynamically, pulling your parameters from some other list as needed.
What would help most if if you had a sketch of what you want to produce, as there are some methods that may or may not work depending on the outcome you want. For example, if you wanted to have a linear scale against the bar, then having these both as independent components is going to cause you misalignment grief at slightly differing resolutions.
This is what I typically use for analogue bars. It's a single SVG that contains the bar and the linear scale, as well as other things like static marker indicators (e.g. for showing alarm limits)