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ASForrest

FTView SE Popups

8 posts in this topic

Hi all, Doing my first project with FTView SE, and I have a few popup-related questions. Can anyone help me out? 1. Is there a way to allow the operators to move the popup windows around on the screen, when they only have a touchscreen and not a mouse? 2. If one popup is active, and I want to display another instance of the same popup beside it (e.g. look at two motor popups at the same time), is there a way to ensure that the second popup doesn't appear over the top of the first? 3. This one is a bit more complicated :) I have a motor popup - someone presses a motor button, and the button runs two commands - the first writes a string to a tag that is displayed at the top of the popup, so that when the popup appears, it has "Motor ABC" written across the top. The second opens the popup and points to Motor ABC's UDT for all my controls. My concern is that there are two clients. If someone clicks on Motor ABC, this will all be fine - but if someone on the other client then clicks on Motor 123, FTView will load "Motor 123" into the tag, and then "Motor 123" will display at the top of both popups on both clients. Or at least that's what I'm concerned about. This would also occur if someone opened two motor popups on the same client. My thought to fix this one is to point the string display to #2 instead of a HMI tag (#1 is the motor AOI), and then load "Motor ABC" into #2 when I open the popup. So my command would be "Display Popup_Motor /T{/Data_Area::[shortcut]Motor_ABC},"Motor ABC". If I understand correctly, this will just open an instance of this popup with "Motor ABC" in it's own local "#2" register, and then if another is opened, it will have "Motor 123" in it's own local "#2" register, and they won't change each other. Am I right on this? Likewise I want to do a similar thing with a confirmation popup. I have a popup with a local message display, a confirm button and a cancel button, so when an operator presses a button, it pops up and says "you are about to do this. Are you sure?". Obviously I want to make sure that if I have one message pop up, and someone on the other client brings up a message, it doesn't change the message on the first client as well. Can I likewise point the message display to #2 (#1 is the tag that the "confirm" button turns on) and have the command "Display Popup_Confirm /T{/Data_Area::[shortcut]Line_Shutdown},1" to bring up message #1 and link the Confirm button to the Line_Shutdown tag? Thanks!

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I dont really understand what you write in here but i do understand what you want, let see you have 5 motor, each motor you have a command like - Auto/Manual, Manual Start and other indicator you wanted to include. first you create a pop up window called motor control (Example only), then a latch button for auto/manual selection (PB1) and for your manual start command (Pb2). in the tag addressing write #1 for PB1 and #2 for PB2. ... add any value as long it wont repeat. then create a Parameter file called motor1 for motor 1 inside parameter file write #1= {PLC address for motor1 Auto/manual Selec} #2= {PLC Address for Motor1 manual Start} # # #... Then in process screen where you motor is located create a "touch" command then you configure your call up screen ( Motor Pop Up) and the parameter file (Motor1).. there you have it.. you can do motor control as much as you can without having conflict.. cheers, Ganie

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Hi Ganie, Yes, I understand that part of it. In my case it's even simpler, because I have a UDT called MOTOR which has members StartButton, StopButton, ResetButton etc. So I set the Start button to toggle #1.StartButton, the Stop button to toggle #1.StopButton etc, then I just set the whole display to replace #1 with Motor_ABC. So The start button toggles Motor_ABC.StartButton, and so on. What I want to do here is aside from all that. I want to have a string display for the title with the displayed string being #2. Then when I call the display I set #2 to be "Motor ABC". If I open a second popup for motor 123, I want to set #2 to be "Motor 123", but I don't want the string on the first display to change to "Motor 123" as well The other way to do it is to create a "title" string in the UDT and just point the string display to #1.Title. But it's a LOT more time consuming that way, because then I have to browse the tags on 30 or so different AOI's and manually enter it, rather than just typing it into my button commands on FTView. And plus, it just seems like an unnecessary waste of bandwidth.

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Hi AsForrest.. Good that you create UDT thats a good apprroach on writting codes, for your String for Motor naming this is how you do it: Lets see you already used up your parameter number from #1 to #15 so I gonna used #20 for the motor string name: in your Local data base (HMI Tags) tick the first folder and go to upper part of the screen where you can find the icon called "create Folder" then create. name our folder " Motor Name" (Example Only) then you can start your naming : example: Under Motor Name: MotorName\Motor01 Type: String Under Data Source: Type: Memory Intial Value: Pump 01- Inlet Supply the intial value is the display description in your pup up. then in your Parameter file: #20 = Motorname\Motor01 ( You can used the navigational tool to go to Tag browser to locate the folder name "MotorName" I hope i help.. Cheers, Ganie

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Hi Gnex, I'm not using parameter files at all, I'm just loading the parameters using the run command option on the button. In any case, I've just installed the system, so for future readers, here's what I found. 1. Is there a way to allow the operators to move the popup windows around on the screen, when they only have a touchscreen and not a mouse? - yes, it turns out the AB touchscreens (and I would presume most others) allow you to tap and drag windows around like normal. Obviously you have to make sure to show the title bar for the popup 2. If one popup is active, and I want to display another instance of the same popup beside it (e.g. look at two motor popups at the same time), is there a way to ensure that the second popup doesn't appear over the top of the first? Still haven't found a way to do this one, I ended up redesigning a few things to lessen the impact of this problem. Still open to options if anyone has another idea As for the last one, no you can't use constants as tags when calling your displays. What I ended up doing was creating a folder of HMI tags called "constants", which contained 100 tags, named 1 to 100, with the values 1 to 100. Then instead of calling for "12", I call for "Constants\12". I also had to create string tags for my headers. A little bit cumbersome but my only other real option was VBA.

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If the Display Type of your pop-up screens are going to be "On Top" then you can change the X and Y position of where you want them to appear on the screen. Just right click on the screen where your pop-ups will appear and in the display properties you can adjust the x and y axis. Hope this helps!

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Yes, I can do that, but that only works if I'm talking about different popups. If the operator clicks on 2 or more motors, they're using the same popup just with a different tag connection, so the window will appear in the same spot each time

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