Multi-Monitor Designer/Vision Support

New to product, so this may be obvious to the forum, but how do you configured your application to support multiple monitors for Central Control Room applications?

Hi ChrisGray

With Ignition, Clients don’t cost so you can just run two or more clients, one in each window,

alternatively you can look at this discussion:

https://www.inductiveautomation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=11546&p=41697&hilit=monitors#p41697

Happy new Year

Unfortunately, Ignition doesn’t have specific configurations for mult-monitor usage. However as Chris has eluded you just run another instance of the application in your secondary monitor. For example, I have a workstation that has 3 monitors. I run a full-screen application instance in each monitor.

This works okay by has its quirks…and don’t worry I’ve made suggestions to IA on their feature request system to improve this. Hopefully as the topic keeps coming up they’ll visit it :wink:;);););):wink: And members VOTE on that suggestion :wink:

Anyway, so each time you launch an instance you require a client license. Now, if you have the “unlimited” license no-biggie. But if you’re providing a smaller system, and to save a few bucks you use the 5 client or Single client licenses…then you have to be more aware of the impact of launching multiple instances on a single workstation.

Another quirk…since they are 3 instances of the application, each is unique. So each time you update the project, you have manually update each instance. Not that big of a deal, but worh noting. What is a bigger deal, is user management. So if you are using security and you need to log on, well you have 3 instances you have to log onto. Now, you can mitigate this with some basic system message scripting but it’s not obvious. I’ve had some support on this from members of the forum so be sure to ask if you get to that point.

Of course if you are using docked windows they will repeat across all monitors so you’ll have duplicate information across all monitors. You could probably figure out some fancy scripting to dynamically change the content based on the monitor it’s open on, but that’s just a dream for me at the moment. Probably would have to configure some template repeaters/visibility and such…*deepthoughts

Now, you get into the challenge launching 3 applications to 3 separate monitors, well that takes some work too but still can be a manual process. Again with the forum help you can review this great tool to help move applications from monitor to monitor:


inductiveautomation.com/forum/v … =81&t=6017

I highly recommend this, easy to put into the project and allows you to move full-screen projects to different monitors relatively easy. It would be great to figure out how to automate it all, so 3 instances open and move to respective monitors. You would have to create some .bat files to launch the applications and see if you could improve upon Kyle’s scripting to automatically locate and move to the preset monitor. I have only thought about taking on that challenge…only so much time in the day.

You could also do this simply by manually launching each project and then dragging a “windowed” project from monitor to monitor. This was my original method, but I have had some odd issues with various message pops not properly appearing on the correct monitor. Seem to get 'stuck" on the primary. Think confirmation popup when you update the client. After setting it up as full-screen and using Kyle’s scripting I have better results.

I could have also could also tried to build a single application, that had a resolution of 5750 x 1080…but that didn’t seem ideal either as in the future we will probably create additional Ignition projects for various areas of the plant. I would prefer to build those as separate applications versus 1 large application for a variety of reasons. I would assume there would be other quirks to this approach as well, so I don’t think either is ideal but I have the notion that the route I have taken provides the best flexibility, even though I have a license impact as I am just using the “Works Lite” 5-client package at this time. Next year it will be upgraded to unlimited and I won’t have to worry about it.

I probably made it sound more painful, but many of us are using multiple monitors, but like I said there are “quirks” to be considered and mitigated for it to be fluid. But hey, IA can put it on the road-map for v7.9!

Hi Paullys50. I know this is an old post, but I'm exactly at this point in my project. Could you explain how this would work or point me in the right direction? That would be very much appreciated.

I've created a post for the issue. Feel free to answer there, so we don't spam this one.

Just use system.gui.openDesktop to open extended clients on other monitors.

https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/display/DOC79/system.gui.openDesktop

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.openDesktop() is ruled out in that other topic because it is “inconvenient”.

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