Using Ignition 8.1.2, Vision
Is there a way to launch PC apps or exe within a container in Ignition?
I see system.util.execute but that launches applications in their own window.
That is the expected behavior, when you’re doing system.util.execute to say “Open Notepad” for instance, you are telling the OS hey open the notepad app which will happen as if it was selected off the Start menu.
There is definitely no built in way to do this. My intuition is telling me that it’s not possible. But maybe someone much smarter than me knows a way.
Is there a specific reason why you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish?
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The answer is no.
A long, long, long time ago we had an ActiveX component in Vision that could essentially do this, by “supporting” a Windows-only technology that allows this in limited capacity.
We stopped supporting it in Ignition 7.5, it’s never been truly supported in Java, and even Microsoft no longer supports ActiveX in any real capacity: ActiveX - Wikipedia
Yes, something similar to ActiveX, except I realized ActiveX is no longer supported plus poses some security risk, so thought about asking if there is another way to do it…
The reason I am trying to launch an application is this:
I need a way to give user an ability to be able to zoom/pan/edit some images. Since ignition’s image component doesn’t truly give these abilities without lots of scripting, I was hoping to launch an image viewer such as IrfanView or GIMP and let user go wild with their image handling requirement.
Currently what I am doing is take the required images, create a PDF (via Ignition reports), and use the PDF viewer component in Ignition. It satisfies zoom/pan requirement, but has these extra steps of creating PDF, plus its not truly viewing just an image… Or edit them
There is other issues such as running reports on Gateway only, and importing/exporting files back and forth between gateway and client… so I was hoping to attack the problem by giving user an image viewer application, and hence this approach of launching PC apps within Vision Container
You can pan/zoom images displayed in paintable canvas. Minor adjustments to the scripts one would use to display image blobs from a database.