Locally Scoped Alarms Question

Ignition
1

Good Afternoon,

Let me first explain the context of my question. Currently we are using an Ignition gateway running at another facility that is geographically isolated. We are trying to prove that Ignition is the right tool to management (it is clear to me that it is perfect for us) for scaleable HMI to SCADA deployments and as such have not secured capital for our own gateway running on a more local network/server.

Looking at documentation, and seeing “Alarming” out on the gateway gave me the initial impression that the alarms in Ignition are scoped for a global SCADA type alarming structure that requires filtering to zero in on alarms of interest on a client.

However, after digging a bit more, I now believe I can set up alarms for one specific cell/HMI without disturbing the alarms/pipelines/transaction groups the engineers in the other location are using already. I am going to lay out what I think I need to do and I am hoping that someone can tell me if it will work.

First, I will take the tags that exist at the PLC level as alarms (booleans that are in the project via an OPC device) and edit the tag to have an alarm “bound” to them as described here:

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Then I can drag an alarm status table into a window and change the “Source Filter” to the folder that has the aforementioned OPC connected tags:

In this way, will I be able to view only the few tags that I have set up for this individual HMI as alarms in the Alarm Status Table?

Can the “Source Filter” point to a folder I created for these tags?

Will any alarms I associate with a tag in this folder get automatically added to a Transaction Group, Pipeline, or other Ignition feature that will cause them to be displayed to any global user of the gateway by default when they are setting up alarms in a separate, unrelated HMI or SCADA project?

I do not want to create alarms that automatically need to be accounted for in the other groups projects because it will create non-standard work and changes to account for them. I am happy to clarify my question if need be, I realize I may not be asking in a way that is tractable to an answer/solution.

Thanks!

2

You’re on the right track. Filtering on the source path will give you only the alarms for tags which have the folder path you’ve specified. If you demo the display with your alarm table on it, and right click on the header for the alarm table, you can enable the “Source Path” column. If you look at the values in that column, unfiltered, you’ll see that the Source Path actually includes other information about the provider for the tag, etc… So if you want to filter on Source Path, make sure you’ve got the whole source path in the filter. For example, if you’re using the default tag provider, then a full source filter might be:

 prov:default:/tag:OPCTagFolder/HMI_Specific_Tags/*

Note that you should put an asterisk on the right side of your filter. The asterisk is a wild card. So, with the above filter, you’re telling ignition, “I want every tag with a path that starts with, ‘prov:default/tag:OPCTagFolder/HMI_Specific_Tags/’”. So you’ll get everything in that folder and its subfolders.

What I usually do for this, for convenience, is put the simple folder path to the alarms that I want, and put asterisks on both sides of it. That way I don’t need to worry about the provider and stuff. The only disadvantage I get by doing this is that I shouldn’t have duplicate tag paths embedded in other folders. For example, if you use…

 *OPCTagFolder/HMI_Specific_Tags/*

then you’ll get everything in the “OPCTagFolder/HMI_Specific_Tags/” folder, as well as everything in the “Some_Other_Folder_Path/OPCTagFolder/HMI_Specific_Tags/” folder.

1 Like
3

excellent, thank you so much