I may be thinking about this the wrong way. When I upgraded my legacy FSQL project it created a new project in ignition similar to what I would expect for an old FPMI project. The groups are within this new project and everything appears to be fine. When I go to one of my converted FPMI projects the transactional groups do not show. My question is this; must each project contain its own groups or should “all” groups be available to “all” projects? I am unclear on how the transactional groups relate to “runtime” projects. Like I said I may be thinking the wrong way.
Indeed, this is a bit of a shift from the legacy versions in terms of what a “project” means.
Basically it breaks down like this: Projects can contain include windows and groups, or only one of the two. For windows/Vision stuff, it works just like in FactoryPMI. For groups, however, it’s a bit different than how FactorySQL use to work. Each project that has groups is executed in the gateway. That means you can have multiple projects that execute groups, unlike in FactorySQL, where there was just the single project in the service.
Now, the actual usefulness of this is debatable. There’s not really a benefit of having groups split across projects (except, maybe, for organization in very clear cut cases where you might want to mode particular projects to other machines or something). So, we expect that most people will either have a separate project for all of their transaction groups, or just one project for the whole gateway with everything in it. One thing to note is that any project that doesn’t have launchable windows in it won’t show up on the gateway homepage.
In the legacy upgrade, we decided to just have it make a new group. I suppose it should be augmented to let you create a new one, or add the import to an existing group. Like I said above, from an execution point of view it doesn’t really make a difference, but for organization, if your gateway only has 1 real project, it’s understandable that you’d want everything in there. You can move the groups, though admittedly it’s not the easiest thing- you need to go into your imported project, export your transaction groups from the groups’ right-click menu, and then import them in the destination project.
Hope that clears things up a bit!
Thanks Colby,
I guess in my case I will have to run 1 project for the transactional groups, since I have 4 other FPMI like projects running. In order to add or work with groups we will have to switch to the transactional group project.
You can also launch 2 designers if you’d like.
Ok, a related question…
I used the legacy upgrade function to being in my old FSQL groups. It seemed to work, and I could see the groups in the dialog box. My question- where are they? I don’t see them in the designer, and can’t find a tgrp file anywhere.
On the Ignition homepage, if I select the ‘Home’ tab, it says ‘no projects have transaction groups defined’. If I select the ‘Status’ tab, it says I have 23 transaction groups. How do I get them in my projects?
Also, one of my groups uses the ping plugin. Where would I put that dll in the Ignition folder?
Ok, I’m confused, but it’s working better. I can’t see any projects with transaction groups in the Ignition gateway of the PC where I did the actual FactorySQL legacy conversion. But, I downloaded a system backup and uploaded it on a new PC, and now I can see a project called FACSQLExport, and it has the groups I would expect to see. I guess I can export this project and bring it back to the original PC so I have access to the groups there as well.
The only remaining question is what I need to do with the ping dll. I’ll start the groups and see what happens.
Hi-
When the groups are imported, it creates a new project for them (named off of the file used in the import). The home page might just be reporting incorrectly, we’ve noticed that if no groups are running it will report that there are no groups in the project. Try going to the Project management section of the gateway and checking if the project was created. Then, launch the designer and see if you can choose to edit that project.
As far as the plugin, unfortunately there currently isn’t support for the old .Net FSQL plugins. The only possibility that I can think of right now would be to whip something up in python and use the runScript expression in the action item. Soon we’ll add in support for calling gateway side modules from groups, but it currently isn’t there.
Regards,