Vision: Tag Info popup on tag(s) under mouse

This is something that’s possible to do in a few other SCADA packages that I’m interested to see how difficult this would be to implement in Ignition.

Basically, you hover your mouse over a component that has a tag associated with it, press a key combination (Ctrl+I for example), and an info popup shows up with info about the tags for those components. If there are multiple tags, you should be able to cycle between them. Typical info would be current value, units, PLC, PLC address, engineering units, etc.

Look forward to your thoughts.

Nick

Sounds like it should be doable with a bunch of Java Swing API calls after triggering with a global key event.

To me, you are describing a face plate. All of the info you describe is in associated face plate popup window that opens when the component is clicked. For example, I have an analog input component, I also have an analog input pop up window (the face plate), when I mouse click on my analog input component the face plate pops up and I have all the information you describe available., granted it’s a large face plate and provides a lot of options.

If you want a condensed version, you could use a mouse-click and modifier (ALT, CNTRL) to open a “mini” version of a face plate. Maybe that shows a single line that you can cycle through. I would use a button that would trigger the cycle, which could be clicked or use a key. Then that swaps the tag information into the button text. Change the look of the button so it doesn’t look like a button, but rather just a box with a line of text.

You of course would need to write some scripting to create the text you wish to display for each press, and something like the tag value would be a snap shot of the value in this example.

StackOverflow is awesome. This might get you started:

I have these faceplates for all of my devices already that show the values of my tags, in some form, but I don’t show any other potentially useful info for a developer. This is where this info popup would come in. The point of it is also not to rely on development work once the script is created; it should automatically work for all components on any screen. I shouldn’t have to customise it at all, which is how these other scada systems work. Also, this should work on faceplates as well, so that you can actually see what the names of the tags are behind all of the components, and not just see their values.

Thanks Phil, I’ll have a look. Still not sure how to pull the tags from the components once I’ve got them though :thinking:

Hi Nick, Did you get anywhere with this, I’m looking for the same functionality for a new project. To make it easy for operations to point out to maintenance/developer what is wrong.

DJB