[System]Mobile/Location

In the tag browser: [System]Mobile/Location
Looks like GPS info should populate these tags. From where? How?

Those tags would be populated by the legacy Mobile Module, which did some smoke-and-mirrors to “support” Vision clients on mobile devices. For a huge list of reasons, it was a dead-end technologically, so it’s been replaced completely by Perspective in Ignition 8.0.

More specifically - those tags should get values after a mobile browser session accepts the prompt to share location data. That data then gets send from the mobile browser back to the gateway, which then puts it into the client tags.

So if I wanted to put a tablet in a fork truck to monitor inventory at specific locations on the yard. I would need a Perspective licence on my gateway? And if I had ten fork trucks, how many licenses would I need?

Unless these tablets can run Vision clients.

One license, unless each fork truck was also running its own gateway.

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Microsoft Surface tablets run Windows 10 and have internal GPS receivers. Would it be feasible to use one for my scenario? If so, how could I get the GPS data from the tablet to the Ignition gateway?

A Surface tablet should be able to run Vision as well as Perspective, but your access to GPS data will be much, much easier with Perspective. In Perspective, you would enable the session property for geolocation, and then the mobile device (or web browser, if it supports the requisite API) would prompt the user to send location data. Once that’s accepted, you’ll start getting updated values in the requisite session properties:
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I’m being asked to avoid using Perspective if possible, how much more difficult would it be in a regular Vision client?

The (first) complicated piece in Vision is even accessing the device’s location. Web browsers already have the APIs for this data, but Java does not have access to this directly. In basically everything I can find, you need to leverage some existing “native” library (ie, compiled specifically for x64 Windows) that Java can call, and hope that your device’s GPS drivers have an API that’s also supported.

You could first start with something like this to see if it’s even possible following that route: GPS Inspector - A GPS Tool interface written in Java

The other option is, basically, writing your own C# or other native binary that uses Windows’ Geolocation API and then, within Ignition, running that separate program and parsing the results; something like the approach described here:

This is decidedly not trivial. Again - the mobile module did it by leaning on web browsers, which already have this ability programmed in. Perspective uses the same “trick”, but Vision simply does not have this capability programmed in.

Hello,
In the same thread, if the 10 forktrucks were used with perspective tablets, how is it possible to obtain the relevant geolocation for each and use to move separate Perspective map ui markers or similar for each. How would the individual forklifts be identified to be mapped to the relevant marker?