[FEATURE] Increase usability of the Perspective Power Chart component

You can always use multiple y axes for this.

I agree this would be useful. Things like last week, last 7 days, last month etc. It's almost there in the realtime selections, but what makes it a bit useless is that you then can't traverse backwards in time... You're stuck from now to x time period ago :confused:

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Selection of the interpolation method could also be improved upon. I have no idea what any of the options actually do, and the operators will think it’s in Swahili (assuming they’re not from a country that speaks Swahili).

It would be awesome if there was an info popup or something that shows you a description and an example of all of the options.

Secondly, changing the colour of the plot background isn’t really supported, as when you do, you lose lots of niceties like the axes labels are butt right up against the very top of the plot and look dumb,
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The x-trace legend text is non-readable (issue is more that the legend background box is a fixed size and doesn’t accommodate longer text)
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Also, this gap between the plot and the x-axis has always bugged me. It looks like it’s disconnected from the plot and not part of it. Can this be removed?

One more: I have this displayed in 4K and I still have a scrollbar for my pen legend. Can we have access to the basis/shrink/grow settings of this so that we can control the size?

Also the lack of gridlines, but I remember reading that they’re coming, or have come

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Just adding my voice to the chorus: I too have a customer with a brand new Ignition system with which they are otherwise thoroughly impressed, but are disappointed with the inability to show data as stored, and pushing me for a solution.

The doc says:

HOWEVER, this only works for ONE tag. Only one tag will be displayed if you add more… Which is particularly frustrating as I thought we finally had a way to display asStored in the powerchart, only to find out it makes it practically unusable.

Try the table history provider with a transaction group and storage on intervals. (Possibly conditioned on motor running status.) Sometimes the convenience and data storage savings of the tag historian aren’t worth the hassles.

Sounds like something to inherently fix though rather than have to bandaid :person_shrugging:

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I’m not convinced there’s a fix. Any kind of recording that uses a deadband to save storage is inherently lossy, and if the deadband is zero, tall format wastes gobs of space compared to a wide table format. You have to pick your poison.

There might be better defaults, though. Maybe someone who uses the historian a lot (that wouldn’t be me) could make suggestions to IA. Hmmm?

I see that v8.1.18 has been released…does this mean that the power chart will now display data from a tag history database as stored? Or is this related to the internal historian only?

I’m trying to add a custom pen name through a script but it gets overwritten and the chart always shows a tag path. Is there a work around available to achieve this or will this be supported in the future?

Another example of the x-axis behaving badly (not to mention this gateway’s memory usage… but that’s another issue):

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This is true for a lot of trends we use, but we also have many that will have 10+ trends of the same process value, and adding a single unit to the axis makes a lot more sense than to each of the pen names. However I find the limited ability to position/orient the axis label makes this even more confusing!

I created another request for Vision but it equally applies to Power Chart:

Can we get an update from IA where dev is up to RE the requests in this post?

Just answering that question would probably take all day. Long forum threads like this are a really difficult mechanism for us to work with. Perhaps a collection of ideas forum links would be helpful. Or maybe we could hop on a call and build a google doc of actionable, precise requests that could be correlated with feature requests in our internal tracking system.

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BTW, some of these issues also apply to the EasyChart in Vision. E.g. the issue of the timeline labels...
You literally need to count from the left or right on this chart to work out what day is what along the timeline, which is super slow and painful (without using the x-trace, of course - but trends should be easily readable just by looking at them, not just interacting with them)

This is a perfect example of how I believe this should be (I've also passed this onto IA, but added here for everyone else)

Full date/times should be displayed at the major gridlines; they should be based on midnight, and should be predictable at all zoom levels e.g.
2022-09-22 12:05:00
2022-09-22 12:10:00
2022-09-22 12:15:00

not

2022-09-22 12:40
2022-09-22 12:46
2022-09-22 12:53
(these aren't even evenly spaced without the seconds showing... see my post after this one for this exact example - this is so very hard to read)

Minor gridlines should be shown as well which divide the major gridlines by logical and predictable values. e.g. something that divides into 60, not some random number that's the result of a simple calculation of span/gridlines.

I would also like to see the realtime and historic modes disappear and merged into one - there's no need to separate these and it makes it more difficult to use the chart. In the screenshot above, the start, end, and time span can all be modified, with start/end changes modifying the time span, and time span changes modifying the start time.
e.g.
you change start time, and the time span is updated to reflect the new time span using the format 1y 12w 5d 9h 12m 45s.
you change the time span, and the start time is updated to reflect the new time span.

Add to that a toggle to turn on live time tracking + a button to get to "now", and you have realtime mode. Pan the view, and you have historical mode with or without live time tracking.

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Real-world demonstration of how difficult it is to use the Power Chart.

Can someone please tell me how many seconds are between these two x-traces?

Or how many seconds are between these dips?

As an operator or maintenance personnel, looking at the Power Chart graphs requires far more work than it should!! Even an experienced integrator will struggle to read and interpret these graphs

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I changed the x-trace date format to include seconds. Not ideal, but it kind of works.
Sometimes you really need to zoom in so the xtrace isn't on top of each other.


If you have the combination: powerchart + historical deadband + a dodgy connection, be aware!

I have a lot of 4G cellular connections, so a loss of communication is common for me.
Had a lengthy chat with support about this and the conclusion was that this is the intended function.
There was some talk about a future request, but i havent heard anything yet.

Only way to "fix" this is to have a really small maximum time between samples. The problem isnt fixed either, its just limited to the maximum time.

A picure says more than a 1000 words :slightly_smiling_face:
If data integrity is 0, then powerchart uses the timestamp, but the not the value of that entry, to create a flat line on the chart.

This is how the database for this trend would look like:
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In my opinion the line should have been drawn up to the point of loss of communication.
The data (value 3 in this case) is even in the database!
Guess they deem the information to be inaccurate.
But they still use the timestamp to draw a flat line, its weird.

Stopping the line at the last entry of dataintegrity 192 would also be better, but not ideal.

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Hey everyone -

Few questions that my customers are struggling with right now in the power chart in Perspektive:

  1. is there a way to disable the second (small) chart that shows up when you switch to historical view vs real-time ?

  2. is there a way to manipulate the pens when they are added through the „add pen to chart“ button on the tag browser ? I would like to influence the default values/attribute as well as the axis they are supposed to go on , based on a category of which the tag would fit in

  3. when I add y axis to the left of the chart they are displaying perfectly but if I add them to the right of the chart they don’t space out properly so the label overlaps and is unreadable for all but the left axis on the right

It can be removed via CSS.

The only way that I know of, would be to use a property change event on the pens prop, and effect the changes after they have been added.

Currently there no way (that I am aware of) to hi-jack the actual js that is executed when the "add pen to chart" button is clicked.

You can of course provide your own tag browse component, and then script the addition of pens the chart.

I would say this is probably a bug. Contacting support is the official way to report bugs, and find out if IA is aware of them or not.

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Another user story.
Can someone tell me the date/times of these red vertical lines (drawn in paint) on the chart? and consequently the time between the lines?
It's impossible without drawing your own grid onto it. This is not how a SCADA trend should be.. (I know I can use the x-trace, but what if I wanted to screenshot this / print it and send it to someone to review? Regardless, the time axis is almost useless if you want to use it to help analyse a trend)
It's been almost 2 years since I first raised all of my concerns with this integral SCADA tool :frowning:

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