Feature Request - Seamless Spawning of Separate Projects

Just promoting an idea that I’ve seen discussed since 2012 on these boards, but so far no motion.

It should be possible to spawn a fully independent project from an already open project. This is a basic code modularity issue. It is frequently the case that one employee will need a window with detailed, granular information for their role, while a different employee in an administrative capacity needs to oversee top-level information across multiple areas.

In the case of an off-normal event, the administrator should be able to, with a click, pull up detailed, granular information on that particular area. They should still be able to review the information from across the facility simultaneously.

Currently the closest option is retarget, but that will shut down the pre-existing window. The response most often given on these boards is for the granular project to be included as a separate window in the other project, which goes against the basic modularity of software. This is equivalent to telling me to copy-paste the source code for, say scipy.interpolate.quad into my code to perform an integration. That would work, until the first time that scipy function is upgraded and I now have a headache to ensure all instances are properly updated.

Failing that, is there anyway to call a project from the command line using system.util.execute, that passes the credentials as an argument? There must be, since retarget seems to do that already.

Consider utilizing project inheritance made available in Ignition 8. Place all shared/re-used resources above the other projects in the inheritance chain. This way you can include the granular information in your overview project without source duplication.

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I think this can be solved through a proper templating structure, i.e. having more detailed versions of templates inherit from the simpler versions. This would still require the use of additional windows, but if your main functionality is templated the repetition would be minimized.

Or, we could eliminate repetition altogether by doing what several users have independently decided would be the best solution for almost a decade.

Put it up on the ideas portal. That is the official place to make feature requests, and IA has committed to trying to implement top-voted features identified there. If it is as popular an idea as you think, the votes will give it the priority you think it deserves.

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Thanks Phil, wasn’t aware. Appreciate it!

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