So, one of the use cases for ignition in our plant is to replace an antiquated alarming system. The alarming system has a GUI overlay that runs on a public computer in the main control room.
In the event of an alarm, it behaves much like an Ignition Alarm List. It displays info and can be acknowledged. There have been issues with people who did not know what they were doing acknowledging, and thus silencing, alarms.
What we would like to do for our upgrade is to run the Alarmlist in such a way that any user clicking the acknowledge button would be challenged, in a text box, to input credentials from a user role with appropriate permissions.
I’m circling around how to do this, but the ‘acknowledge’ button seems to be too integrally built into the alarmlist to modify it. I certainly don’t relish the idea of building a duplicate in Alarm List functionality from scratch simply to modify the behavior of one button.
Is there a way to do this? Again, to summarize, I’m looking for an Alarmlist with read/write permissions set higher than those of the account used to run the public terminal client, that still responds to attempts to acknowledge from users at that terminal with permissions, if they enter them in a textfield. I’m looking specifically at ‘onDoubleClicked’ in the scripting window as a good place to start.
Hide the footer on the alarm list control and then use a normal button to do the challenge response.
If they pass the challenge you just run the script to acknowledge the alarms.
Or if you do not want alarm acknowledged at all on that terminal, just show/hide the footer on the control based off of a Role or even the computer name of the terminal.
We definitely want to be able to acknowledge from the terminal. For the sake of simplicity, we want all current functionality to be duplicated as closely as possible, to make things easier on our techs and guards. Any expanded functionality we are trying to keep on the back-end, and have it ‘just work’ for those users, for instance, being able to alert users via email/SMS.
I’m working on a few problems implementing what you suggested, but for the moment, I believe the solution is RTFM. One question jumps out that I don’t see a clear answer for, however:
I’d also like for the inputBox to obscure the text when the user types their password. Is there a way to do this?
If you're using a dedicated popup window, use the Password Field component. If you're using scripting, use system.gui.passwordBox() to open the dialog.