Complaints/annoyances about the new ignition designer in 8.1

Main annoyance - going between the scripting module and perspective modules. The project browser and the tag browser swap spots inside the designer when clicking between them. To me, this offeres absolutely no benefit, and most of the time I end up misclicking because the windows are suddenly swapped. All of a sudden I’m editing a tag when I was hoping to edit a script!

Second annoyance - in the tag browser, if I have a tag highlighted in blue after I have clicked on it, if I want to work on another tag, lets say in a different instance much further down, if I try to open that instance and look at all the tags, if I don’t click on the instance first before trying to expand it, then suddenly the tag browser goes back to the first tag that I is still highlighted in blue from my previous click, potentially hundreds if not thousands of tags somewhere else in the designer.

Third annoyance, in the tag browser we have three sub-headers - tag, value, and datatype. As I scroll down the browser trying to find an instance, the headers disappear. This is annoying because in order to re-size the header in case I need to be able to read the full tag name or typeId, I have to scroll all the way back up to adjust. It would be nice if those headers were accessable from anywhere in the browser.

/endrant

  1. there’s a bug ticket already for this in IAs system.
    There are lots of bugs currently with the tag browser… And the project browser… [BUG-864] Tag Browser refocuses on selected tag when other tags are expanded

  2. this was raised in 2014 on the ideas forum and I saw just recently that it was marked as in progress. Better late than never I guess!! But this has been a pain point for a looong time, I always end up just increasing the width of the tag browser to fullscreen width. It’s easier than scrolling all the way to the top and then trying to find the tag again.
    Speaking of trying to find a tag, try having a large list of mostly contiguous - but with some gaps - tanks like T2994 and then wanting to create a new one, so you copy paste an existing one. Then try to find the newly created tank with its new auto-incremented name. It’s impossible because the new tag isn’t auto-selected…

have you noticed the bug when toggling between modules? very painful.

Yeah, that’s always been the case. Same as when switching to the reporting module, the alarm pipelines, transaction thingo, etc etc. They all seem to have their own palette position settings

Interesting. I seemed to only have noticed the module issue and the browser refocus bug ever since the designer got upgraded in version 8.1. As for how it was before 8.0, I cannot attest to, since I haven’t worked with that product before.