I use UDTs for pretty much everything that I do in Ignition. Because of this templates/embedded views make putting a page together quite easy. I am running into an issue trying to wrap my head around how to give my users an easy to use trend tool. Because I am using UDT my individual pieces of equipment don’t have meaningful names they are just VFD1 or Transmitter5. So when I add a power chart to my perspective project those are the tags that show up in the tag browser. I created a new folder in my Tag Browser named it “History” and added the actual tags with meaningful names from the PLC to it. This presents a couple issues. First I now have to go to each tag and set up tag historian, and second when I set the “tagBrowserStartPath” property to that specific folder it still shows the folders that contain my UDTs. So that is still going to be a little confusing for the end user. I hope this makes sense. I will add some screenshots of my current project to hopefully help this all make sense. I would love some feedback out how others are handling dynamic trending for their users in perspective.
Setting tag history on the UDTs is needed. It’s a setup step, but once it’s done, it’s done. The best way to get an accurate tagBrowserStartPath is to start without it in place and add the first tag to the chart from the folder that you’d like to use as your base. Once added, you’ll want to copy the “Tag Path” value for that tag:
Paste that into the tagBrowserStartPath component property, and remove the value of the tag that you just added (this is the “folder” inside of which the tag resides):
You should now see that the tag browser is displaying tags starting at that path:
Ok, that works. Is there anyway to get my UDTs to display with a different name in the browser? For instance I have a VFD1 UDT that is currently displaying in the browser, however VFD1 doesn’t really mean anything to the operator. Within that VFD UDT there is a description tag. Is there any way to get the power chart to show that description tag as the label instead of VFD1? Does that make sense what I am asking?
If by browser, you mean the “Tag Browser” of the Power Chart where the user will select the tags, simply renaming the UDT inside of the Tag Browser in Ignition Designer will be enough. You’ll see the updated tag in the Power Chart’s Tag Browser:
One thing to note… Renaming tags that are already being stored in tag history will leave “retired” tags in place which have the previous tag name. Those tags still have history bound to them up until the point where the rename occurred, so they’ll still be accessible if you’re viewing historical data in the Power Chart. The renamed tag will have all of the history bound to it from the time that the rename occurred and moving forward from there.
Is there a way to use one POWERChart
Show all the same UDTtags