[FEATURE] Please bring back the old user-friendly tag editor

The thing that I dislike the most is that when editing a UDT I cannot read the entire OPC path in the main editor window. Just as stated above you have to click on the binding icon and then click “edit” just to view the full path. This is insanely cumbersome when working with a UDT. Resizing the column or the window has no effect.

When editing a regular tag you can at least resize the window/column to see the full OPC path which is significantly better.

As a separate issue, I also would rather that when editing tag history, all of the options were visible and greyed out when not in use rather than scrolling to the bottom, enabling tag history and then scrolling to the bottom again to view the expanded list of options.

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Haha, yes, it's a bit redundant... or at least scroll to show all properties for the selected thing that was enabled

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Not sure if someone has already mentioned this, but another annoyance I’ve had is in the UDT editor, the OPC browser popup window disappears when it loses focus… You have to reopen and navigate back to where you were, and if you had selected a bunch of tags before, you have to reselect them. I often have to switch back and forth between searching in documentation and the UDT editor. Would be great if the OPC browser, once opened, locked to the front of the z-order until “add” or “cancel” is clicked.

Would also be great if the user could reposition this OPC browser popup as it covers up tags currently in the UDT definition. Lastly, another nice feature would be if the OPC browser remembered where you last were in the OPC hierarchy until you fully close the UDT editor so that as you are adding tags, you don’t have to constantly re-navigate through the OPC tree, often to the same tag structure.

Separate, but related, I find that the current “Tag Folder” icon in the tag browser is similar enough to the tag icons - mainly due to the flat grey coloring - that it slows down visually scanning through the tag browser. Maybe that’s just me…does look nice though. Ideally there would be a Designer setting that allows us to change the default icons or colors for folders/tags.

Being able to see the tag path was definitely very useful.

It’s kind of sad to have to deal with all these annoyances in Ignition 8.0, being a software that ‘reduces frustration’

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Bump.

Just checking where this one is at? I presume the devs are all busy working on other more important core things :roll_eyes:

Makes me want to write my own tag browser & editor module. ):

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@pturmel You’re module would probably shame the developers into stepping up their game. :smirk:

Also never got any feedback meetings or requests from @ray. I’m sure the developers are slogging through a backlog of improvements and bug fixes but I would stress that unlike an obscure bug, the tag browser is something that is interacted with every time someone opens a designer. I am encouraged by the fact that 8.1.5 finally allowed direct access to alarms and their setpoints that the tag editor will be improved upon and I’m just hoping it happens in the next few months instead of the next few years.

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FYI I just had a good web session with a few of the IA guys (@hpark, @ray, and @amorthland) to discuss my tag editor usage and the issues I currently have with the new workflow. Hopefully they’ve reached out to at least some of the rest of you as well to get a better idea of how it can be improved upon going forward.

As an aside, you really have to hand it to IA for actually reaching out and listening to the users of their software. I don’t know any other company whose software I use for work who do that. Thank you!

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I would like to see the tag search utility that allows you to select multiple tags based on name/alarmed/history that exists in the previous versions.

Hi @erikburns, do you have a screenshot of the search utility you’re talking about that was in previous versions? Apart from the Find/Replace tool (which is still available in 8, and is much improved [they added a Select All/deselect all button which is so good :drooling_face:]), I don’t recall something similar to what you’re talking about :thinking:

@hpark
One other thing I forgot to mention: Referencing sibling UDT tags in the new tag editor is interesting in the new editor. From the menu item image, this is what I see:
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In v7 you would see the tags relative to the UDT that you’re editing, not the whole root tag structure. It’s not worth my time trying to find the UDT in this list, so I normally now just type it out. But again, because the fullscreen panel takes up the entire tag editor now, I can’t actually refer back to the tag list that I have, so I have to go on memory :confused: and my memory for things like this is bad…

This is the UDT that I’m editing and I added a new tag into which is an expression tag where I want to reference another tag within the same UDT:
image

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Here is another one:

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It is the icon highlighted and it brings up the tag search tool below. See my rant earlier in the discussion to get a feeling for how much of a regression it was to eliminate this one feature.

image

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Using Tag Search in V7, I am able to find tags based on if they are Alerted, Historical, by scan class, etc. Then, I am able to choose to select the tag so I can drag it on to a window or object in the window. There is also the option to multi select tags and perform a mass edit. This is very handy if I need to change scaling on a large group of tags or enable/disable logging. I have not yet found a simlar tool in V8.

There's a bug ticket for this one, I'm pretty confident.

This is a Look-and-Feel bug that should be fixed in an upcoming release, hopefully as soon as 8.1.8.

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OK, what about sorting the names of Tag Groups?

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Any updates on this?

The tag groups and other dropdowns still don’t sort in any discernable order. And the OPC Item Path in UDTs isn’t viewable from the tag editor without clicking on the link, then on Edit, then looking at/ editing the connection path, then clicking Commit/ Revert. Even just increasing the character count on this field would be an improvement over how it currently is.


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We’re in the process of overhauling the tag editor to offer better information density and usability. No timeline on when that will be completed, but it is happening.

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An update on this is posted here. We look forward to your feedback!

Garth