Still researching but I am looking at a system with 4 edge panels connecting back to a central gateway. Im a one man show, so I want to set this up from the beginning as best I can to simplify management and development for my sake.
I am looking at the EAM, which I believe will allow me to do most things from the central gateway? I also think ill need to use inheritance and templates heavily as I want everything consistent.
So any advice how what things I need to be researching in the manual to start out on the right foot. Ideally I would like to have a single system wide project on the central where all changes are made, this projects gets pared down into the 4 edge projects which hopefully update when the main in changed and all updates get sent to the edge panels from the central gateway.
Is this possible? And what do I need to learn about to achieve it?
Edge cannot use inheritance. However, a leaf project with inheritance in Standard Ignition can be "collapsed" into a single project by EAM for delivery to Edge. You would need to do all development on that standard gateway for this to work out well.
There is no tool to trigger that on change, but you can schedule tasks in EAM.
The big "gotcha" though is if you're using any scripting that has a project name passed as a parameter, that project name will be "Edge" by default on your Edge systems vs whatever various project names you could have used in your standard gateway.
EAM can certainly help you push out changes to all the other systems. If you’ve not seen this page yet, there’s a great FAQ at the bottom of the page that covers a lot of common scenarios and questions. There are a few limitations to keep in mind, as Phil and Michael said, Edge systems can only utilize one project. There’s also a ton of great people and resources on the forums. You may want to spend some time playing around with the Edge system and catch a couple of the IA university videos; they’re super helpful with bringing people up to speed. Of course, you can ask questions on here too!
So if I am understanding how it works correctly. I could build a master project on the central gateway, in this I would build and style standard components like a pump faceplate for example. Then I could have 1 system wide project, and one project for each of the 4 edge panels which could inherit this pump faceplate. From there I could push the edge projects out to the respective gateways. This way if I change the pump faceplate, all 5 projects on the central gateway update automatically but I would have to push the changes manually to the edge panels.
Is that accurate? How do I make tag bindings during development on the central gateway such that they work when they get to the edge panel?
I’ve never tried, but you might be able to setup an on project update event handler to send it across to EAM automatically. Whether that’s a good idea or not is another question
You need Remote Tag Providers in central for each of the Edge nodes. The four projects would be set to the appropriate default tag provider. Rename the tag providers in each Edge node to match.