[FEATURE] Increase usability of the Perspective Power Chart component

[nminchin]

Hi @jball, I wanted to see if there had been any tickets opened for the 2 items in this post, as these I feel are the biggest issues for our operators and me at the moment. Top priority would be the x-axis values issue, as this actively works to make it very difficult to read a chart

[PGriffith]

Josh isn't an IA employee anymore, but I'll bump the internal tickets we have for the power chart.

[Simen]

8.1.30

This is a welcome change. Glad to see the power chart is being worked on!
Iv been telling customers that its really important that they use historical and not realtime if they want to zoom in

[nminchin]

@Simen

historical and not realtime

There shouldn't even be a distinction imo; there shouldn't be a mode at all. It just creates more headaches and complication for operators

@nminchin

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.

...cue screen recording of what would be infinitely better... to be continued...

[nminchin]

Demos of (sure, this product looks a little dated, but it's super user friendly!):

• auto-scroll enable with time (Power Chart's current "realtime" mode)
• chart drag to scroll time (Power Chart's current "historic" mode)
• "Move to now" button (Power Chart: change from "historic" mode to "realtime" mode)
• span selection
• start/end datetime changing, with span lock enabled. Changing start or end updates the other according to the span. With spanlock disabled, span changes according to new datetimes.
• y-axis scaling via click and drag, as well as via dialogue numeric inputs.
• zoom window

• x-axis / time axis scaling via click and drag

• time axis always displays full datetime (not things like ":03" which is just extremely confusing and looks horrible)
• time axis major ticks display logical datetimes, not random numbers created from a simple division of span/num ticks like 3:04, 3:26, 3:44, 4:06....

[nminchin]

I'm just going to keep venting in hopes it encourages faster change

It's only been 2 years since my first post

[nminchin]

Also, I fixed the gridlines bug Just need to install Greenshot on all of our clients

I added the needed minor ticks/gridlines as well and fixed the time axis major points (need to install Inkscape as well on the clients):

(These issues are getting old guys... )

Quote from another engineer who is only new to Ignition:

[jlandwerlen]

That's a lot of votes for no action.

[nminchin]

I've had a few recent discussions with the product managers at IA to get this moving, so fingers crossed!!

[nminchin]

Another example of a SCADA that appears to do trending well (not that I've used VTSCADA before):

SCADA Trend Viewer

• the time axis looks usable!!! (major gridlines are at logical, predefined times e.g. every 30s offset from 0, not simply span/numberOfMajorTicks leading to gridlines every 47.2213s )
• there doesn't appear to be a historical/realtime mode, which is amazing! (there's no need for these two modes)
• the actual interface looks really nice
• the gridlines aren't hidden by the plot's background..
• the x-trace cursor display nicely across all sub-plots

It is a little bit strange that they put all of those analogues on separate sub-plots since they're all ranged from 0-100... but perhaps it was a marketing thing

[nminchin]

Update:
v8.1.32 has made a good step forward in dealing with one of these issues, and that is to use more logical x-axis major ticks However, there are still a few display bugs with it at the moment, identified below. Definitely a step in the right direction though, so thanks IA for taking on our feedback.

I'm looking forward to the other issues being addressed in the hopefully near future

One comment, I would always want to display the time in 24hr format, but it seems I can only do that if I set the label.format to Auto (not sure why this must be capitalised) but then I miss out on taking advantage of the smarts (although ideally I'd want to show the full datetime at all times, but with the auto major ticks this isn't possible as they will always overlap). Can there be a new property label.timeFormat with values 12/24?

Oopsie

Dates across months really need the month in them (another reason to always show the full datetime in the x-axis labels).

[indenkleefj]

Is there any update on this? Especially the search function.

[kirsten.chambers]

I am also returning to ask, pretty pretty please get returning the data "As Stored" finished. It's hard to fathom that it's been two years since the ticket was created and it's still not on the horizon even though accurate, reliable trending is such a vital part of SCADA. We have users who simply don't trust the trending when the datasets get large, which is NOT a good thing.

I am appreciative of all the work done so far Please help us help our users!

@PGriffith I especially appreciate all your communication and taking our feedback into account, please forgive my hopefully last selfish ping on this issue.

[louagejasper]

I would like to back this!

We are at the point where we made our own PowerChart, just because the data from Ignitions power chart can't be trusted. Interpolation is not an option for basically none of my customers. We need raw data.

[prasath.t]

I have question. In vision easy chart will automatically read the engineering unit from the tag and add the name to axes. if 2 tag have 2 different unit. it will automatically create 2 axes for each tag.

why is not happening in power chart?

[Chris_Murphy]

Thanks for pushing this @nminchin you've helped make some big strides in what is pretty basic functionality for a SCADA system. It's also fantastic that IA have been so accepting of the constructive criticism and are actually working toward implementing your suggestions.

I think one of the key take aways here is that the expected behaviour for this control is documented by what's already in the market. Process Analyst in Citect, Vantage Point, Trend Miner, Axiom etc. There aren't any new ideas being looked for here.

I'd like to add a suggestion to the pile if I may. I find that one of the most useful tools when investigating events is being able to stack pens. This is possible with the current control, but it is a little cumbersome so I do it with some scripting. A button on the toolbar to do this would be great, very common on most other tools. Since the addition of context menus, this has become a bit easier as I can allow the user to stack pens from a right click, but it would be nice to have it baked in.