Looking for inspiration: Example use cases for Named Queries, Transaction Groups, Sequential Function Charts, and Alarm Notification Pipelines

Ignition
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Does anyone have any cool examples of the following that you have seen or created?

  • Named Query
  • Transaction Group
  • Sequential Function Chart
  • Alarm Notification Pipeline

I am dealing with a lot of legacy Ignition projects, with thousands of tags, scripts, and so on -- but absolutely 0 of any of the above have been created over the years. I would like to put these features to use in creative ways (one day) but I'm struggling to find a good starting point. I can read their documentation all day long but without a project to test them out on, I'm worried they will continue to languish without being put to use.

For example, I already know I want to use the Alarm Notification Pipeline in conjunction with an AirLink module to send texts to our employees, like when a visitor shows up to see them or when a PLC encounters an error. And I am thinking about using an SFC to periodically weigh our internal employee list against a master list and update as needed. So on and so forth.

Any other cool features I might not know about would be awesome to learn about too. Links, pics, videos, etc. are all welcome.

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Same here. I’ve never fully understood these features, mainly because I can’t find a use case for them.

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I have found transactions groups are a gateway experience for less experienced personnel. Hey... I want this value put into this table on this schedule, or when this happens. Transaction groups allow for an easy drag and drop. However, you get one step into complexity, now I need to get an index from another table to correlate data, then it starts to get difficult. And then the guy that can just do things with a transaction group has to do "scary" scripting.

Named Queries are one of the things we are trying to use. Basically we want to be able to remove the checkbox that allows for query usage at the client. They also have the nice front end with testing etc... which can also be an easy button for query development, and then when you are faced with something more complex, IE need to do 2 or more queries in a row, you try to do something that isn't supported.

SFC - Never used it. If I have to put SFC anywhere I put it in my PLC. I'm sure there is a use in SCADA but not in the projects I've done.

Alarm Notification Pipeline is really handy for email, text or voice notifications at a plant. We have a few customers that like to have specific alarms sent to email so they can keep track of them is mainly what we see.

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