I am new to Ignition and have taken on the task of using the Ignition demo to try to make a partially working system as a proof of concept for my company. Currently using WonderWare and Aveva System Platform.
I wanted to know if there is a way to make a site tag template similar to System Platform IDE. As a proof of concept I can do a few sites by hand, but could make my work much quicker if Ignition was able to do this. That way I can make multiple of one site type, then just tie in my devices to each template instance.
Thanks in advance!
I haven't used either of those platforms, but I think I understand what you're asking - tell me if i'm wrong.
You want to create a skeleton site UDT definition with all of the common tags in it, possibly including nested device UDT instances in it, however you may also want to nest device or other UDT instances into the individual Site instances as well, to allow some sites with unique additions possible.
If that's what you mean, then know that you cannot add or remove anything from a UDT instance; UDT definition items are fixed in place in terms of their existance. What you can do however, is override the properties of tags or nested UDT instances within the main UDT instance, which includes overriding the "enabled" property of the tags and nested UDT instances.
So you could create a Site definition that included all of the different variations, disabling the unique ones by default in the UDT definition, and only enabling them in the sites that need them.
Depending how many variations there are, this may or may not be a good solution, as then you lose the ability to easily identify the sites that have the unique requirements at a glance (based on looking at their UDT Type).
The other option is to create your base Site definition. Then create derivations of that as separate UDT definitions using the base as their parent UDT type. You can add the unique requirements into these instead. It wouldn't really make sense to have a 1:1 ratio of UDT definitions to UDT instances though, so I'd still try to consolidate them up into the least number of UDT definitions as is practical.
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As an integrator that has used both products, be careful trying to force Ignition into the Aveva box, or Aveva into an Ignition box
Ignition doesn't really have the Site/Area model like SP. If I was going to migrate from SP to Ignition, I'd focus on a tag folder structure with common templates for sites/areas. Then possibly reference those as parameters in other UDTs.
On system platform, I don't recall there being any site template (unless you made a derived template off of an area), but essentially there's not an equivalent in Ignition. With that being said, as @bschroeder mentioned, you'd use a tag folder structure to model your areas and just put your tag instances inside those folders. To create data structures and tags for each folder, I've literally made an "Area" UDT that holds all the data I need for each folder/area and put one in each folder. In my case I'm mainly doing alarm summarization among other things, but when Ignition 8.3 is released, they will be adding alarm summarization on a folder and UDT level so that won't be needed any longer.
The other big difference you may have already noticed is that in system platform, you'll typically have some graphics/symbols tied to your templates that you can just drop on the screen once instances are created. This isn't the case in Ignition as graphics/symbols are kept separate and independent of their associated UDTs, but I'll usually make a folder with the same name as the UDT to keep all the graphics so they're easy to find.
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That is what I am trying to do, apparently my brain just blocked out the UDT section in the training course. Thank you!