Get name out of an active alarm

Educational Engagement
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1

I am trying the build a new project. I want to create an alarm board. I have many different kind of sensors that all have different alarm. I want to be able to send a pop-up window with a background color according to the urgency of the alarm and I also want a good alarm description in this window.

Because of the huge amount of different alarms I want to create a good solution. I want to retrieve the name and description of the active alarm and put it inside two variables. That way I want to make a label where those variables are used. For example: "{AlarmName} active, {AlarmDescription}".

I still cant find out how I can get the info out of an alarm and put it in a variable. Does somebody know how to do this?

2

Alarms configured on tags have a lot of properties available, the priority is a built-in property and a description could exist in one of several different string properties on an alarm.

When alarms are active, they are available through the scripting function:

You can test with this script to try and extract the data you're looking for. There are examples at the bottom, then if you read about the returned objects from this script function you will identify how to fetch specific info you want. The returned objects are explained in this section of the UM page:

Returns​

AlarmQueryResult - The AlarmQueryResult object is a list of PyAlarmEvent objects with some additional helper methods, see Scripting Object Reference.

Additionally, each PyAlarmEvent inside of the AlarmQueryResult object has several built-in methods to extract alarm information. More details on these methods can be found on the Scripting Object Reference page.

3

Would the alarm status table not suffice for what you're after? it sounds exactly what you're describing.

fwiw, I use the alarms fields like this:
name: non-contextual name of the alarm e.g. "Failed to Close"
label: description and equipment label of the device e.g. "Coolant Pump [C001_PU01]"
displayPath: functional area where the device is part of e.g. "Pkg Filtration"

Then you have the ability to display different combinations of these depending on where the alarms are being shown:
Device popups: name only
Parent device popups (e.g. a tank popup that contains a temperature probe within it): label and name
General alarm page: displayPath (area), label (device), and name

However I also rename these names using the translation manager, renaming "Label" to "Device" and "Display Path" to "Area"

4 Likes
4

Thanks for the replies, but I still can't figure it out. Maybe I need to specify my problem a little further.

I have a lot of different tags with alarms. I want to display a pop-up on different screens spread around in the factory. I know that there is an alarm table available, but this is way too much info for my system. Sometimes i want to target all screens and sometime only certain screens in the range of the machine in alarm state.

Because I don't want to make a label for every different alarm I want to make 1 label with variables. Something like: f"{NameAlarm} alarm, temperature = {Temperature}"

I already figured out how to get the value of a tag and store it in a variable, but i still cant figure out how to do the same with the name of an alarm.

Can somebody help me with this? Already struggling for 2 weeks and still no progress.

5

Refer to the link @kvane gave above.

You can reference the name using getName(), although I think name works as well.

6

I tried this in the alarm pipeline:

def handleAlarm(event):
name = system.alarm.getName()
print(name)
"[default]ActiefAlarmNaam".value = name

and I also tried an alarm active script in the tag i want to store the name in:

def alarmActive(tag, tagPath, alarmName, alarmEvent, alarmPath, missedEvents):
naam = system.alarm.getName()
"[default]ActiefAlarmNaam".value = naam

Still nothing is happening.

7

A string in jython that contains the name of a tag does not magically become a reference to that tag. Use the system.tag.* scripting functions to read/write/manipulate tags from jython scripts.

Also, print does not do what most people think when using in Ignition gateway scope. Use a named logger from system.util.getLogger() instead of print.

8

Also, please see Wiki - how to post code on this forum.

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