What would you like to see in an improved Perspective Power Chart?

Ignition
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Power Chart – What features would you like to see?

Hi everyone,

We are currently developing a new Power Chart solution for Ignition Perspective, and I would like to get some input from the Ignition community.

One of our main design goals is that the component should feel familiar to anyone already using Ignition's existing Power Chart. We want to retain the concepts, workflows, and functionality users already know, while expanding the chart with additional capabilities that we have repeatedly needed in real world projects.

The reason we started this project is that, over the years, several of our customers have asked for functionality beyond what we normally have available directly in the Power Chart.

Until now, we have typically solved these requirements by building additional functionality around the chart. Examples include things such as:

  • Saving trend configurations per user

  • Loading previously saved trends

  • User-specific trend setups

  • Additional navigation and interaction tools

  • Extended analysis and visualization functionality

  • Project-specific controls placed alongside the Power Chart

Instead of continuing to build these features as separate additions around the chart, our goal is to integrate them into a more complete Power Chart solution.

We work extensively with SCADA systems in the Norwegian aquaculture and fish processing industries, so naturally many of the requirements we encounter originate from those environments. However, I am sure users working in other industries have completely different requirements, workflows, and ideas that we may never encounter ourselves.

So I would like to ask the community:

If you could add or improve anything in the Power Chart, what would it be?

This could be anything related to:

  • Trend configuration

  • Historical data analysis

  • Navigation, pan and zoom

  • Cursors, crosshairs and value inspection

  • Statistics

  • Annotations and events

  • Saved trends and user preferences

  • Alarm visualization

  • Comparison of different time periods

  • Exporting data or images

  • Mobile/tablet operation

  • Operator workflows

  • Performance with large datasets

  • Anything else you regularly wish the Power Chart could do

Please post your ideas below.

If someone has already suggested something you would also like to see, give that post a like/thumbs-up rather than posting the same request again. That should give us a useful indication of which features are most interesting to the community.

There are probably many good ideas and use cases outside the industries we normally work with, so we are very interested in hearing how other Ignition users, integrators, and designers use trending in their applications.

Our intention is to use the feedback from this thread as input when prioritizing functionality during development.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas.

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@MaryiaDreyer

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Attached is a (butchered - it had other stuff in it as well for other things) list of thing I shared with IA about requests for the power chart. Zipped to upload (docx unsupported by the forum)

PerspectivePowerChart_Improvements.zip (514.9 KB)

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(post deleted by author)

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Thanks a lot for sharing this! It is exactly the kind of input we were hoping to get.
You also seem to have spent quite a bit of time working with and thinking about the Perspective Power Chart. If we get to the point where we are looking for a few experienced Ignition users to test the solution and provide feedback, would you be interested in trying it out?

For anyone else reading the thread, here is a quick summary of the points from the document:

  • Save/load trend views
  • Recall recent unsaved trend views
  • Preserve the current trend after project updates
  • Improve X-Trace boxes and prevent overlap
  • Show engineering units in X-Trace/legend
  • Show text values for discrete/enumerated tags
  • Improve time-axis labels, ticks and gridlines
  • Remove the strict distinction between Realtime and Historical
  • Add span lock
  • Add “Go to now” and realtime tracking
  • Allow common and manually entered time spans
  • Keep sampled values stable while panning
  • Let users control sampled point count
  • Add Tag Browser search
  • Indicate tags already added to the chart
  • Configure pens while adding them
  • Simplify pen colour changes
  • Add data-point markers
  • Stack/unstack pens into separate plots
  • Configurable legend height
  • Drag directly on time/Y axes to adjust range
  • Add a zoom-window tool
  • Show clear loading indication
  • Better handling when no data exists for the selected range

If any of these are also important to you, please like the reply or comment on the specific point.

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Would like some calculation (oob or easy way to do) like:

  • derivative (rate of change)
  • delta
  • peak-to-peak
  • linear regression
  • integral
  • etc.