8.1.5
Putting it bluntly, the Perspective trend tool has a lot of work left to be done to it in order for it to be a useful tool. In its current state, it's very difficult to use. To me, the ability to easily view and diagnose issues from a trend is a cornerstone of any SCADA application.
EDIT: Demos from another SCADA:
The main things are:
Edit: 0) IMO, these are the 2 biggest issues currently with the Power Chart: [FEATURE] Increase usability of the Perspective Power Chart component - #55 by nminchin
1) Inability to pan the view whilst not zoomed in, and being capped at the bounds of the defined view period when you are zoomed in. This has been implemented with the addition of the "free scrolling" option in historical mode
This is by far the most frustrating limitation and makes using the trend for diagnosing issues a very frustrating experience, so much so that operators and I have resorted to using the Vision trend for now if they have Vision available. For other Perspective-only customers it's an ongoing frustration. For example, you select "realtime" 200 minutes. You can't move that backward in time, you're stuck from now to now-200 minutes. Or, you select a historical date range that's 200 minutes long between date1 and date2. You can't move that date range by panning the view. In both modes, you should be able to pan the view. Some might say in realtime you shouldn't be able to, but not being able to only limits usefulness of the chart. It might be useful to add the option to disable panning it if it does indeed need to be fixed in some cases.
2) I haven't (yet?) found how to display the raw pen data and not aggregated samples. Most often it's the raw data that operators are interested in especially for finer time periods, as aggregated data is often misleading and in some cases extremely misleading causing operators to completely mis-diagnose an issue. It's also causing some operators to lose their trust in the displayed data, and for good reasons. For example, in realtime mode sometimes fast changing data sample points move up and down in position as the time period advances e.g. at time = 1, sample x = 10 sample x+1 = 1, then at time = 2, sample x = 9, sample x+1 = 5, and the operators now see that the spike dropped to 5 instead of 1, but then in time = 3 the samples will show differently again. I realise that this is how sampling works, but hopefully you can see how this can cause significant issues for operators trying to read the data. You can do this by setting the props.config.pointCount: -1
3) There doesn't seem to be a way to show data-point markers on the chart to show where the actual data points are located e.g. small squares or circles (although this directly relates to the above and showing raw samples, as showing sampled data point values could be misleading)
4) Add a filter to the tag browser, as currently it's a long process to add tags onto the trend. Need to be able to find tags using search criteria.
5) Add the ability to change the config props from the Trend component, such as number of samples displayed for aggregated data.
6) Removing brushed areas and x-trace cursors is not intuitive to look in the ellipses menu, and the ability to stack infinite of these features is impractical and particularly for cursors it becomes unusable since the info boxes just stack on top of each other leading to a mess of lines. Maybe add an option to limit the number of things that can be placed (you can do by onChange script to remove the items from the arrays, but this would be better as a standard option).
7) Add click and drag and double click to add tags from the tag browser to the chart
8) I don't know if anything can be done about this one, but any time a project change is made and someone has a trend open in a client, they will lose their trend view and all tags they had configured as it will revert back to the designer-saved version. This is incredibly frustrating for users as often it could take a few minutes to set it all back up again, with the very real chance of it all happening again minutes later.
9) The x-trace value box doesn't expand if the length of the tag+value doesn't fit. The text just extends over the bounds of the box. This was fixed and its width is definable, defaulting to auto
10) Add the ability to select a tag path from the 'Add Pens' option in the client interface from the Chart Settings sidebar. Currently this is just a basic text field and without memorising the path of the tag you want, it's unusable.
Some other ideas taken from other SCADA platforms:
- Add ability to "scroll" the x or y axes to increase their ranges. E.g. click and drag on a y axis up and down to change the range of the axis.
- Add a "Go to now" button to move the current range to the "now" and have it then track along with now in realtime (well, every x seconds, usually 1sec). Add an "auto scroll" checkbox so that users can turn automatic tacking along with time off and on - not necessarily just when showing now.
- Add common time periods to easily select from a dropdown list. E.g. 10mins, 1hr, 2hrs 6 hrs, ... (user definable array)
- Ability to change y axis ranges from the client via a popup (as well as via mouse as in (1))
If someone from IA is able to, please have a look at Citect's trend tool, Process Analyst which is where all of the above 4 items came from; it's actually one of the best trend tools that i've ever used. It's intuitive and very functional, despite the rest of the SCADA product being significantly handicapped.
IDEA here, please vote:
) to use it much as they opt for Visionâs. Iâll most likely implement this on some of our Perspective-only sites though where they donât have any other options. Having said that though, the Apex Chart module from 
