Situational Awareness Project

Hi Ignatius,

No we only support one master page per monitor and no dynamic swapping at this point in time. The position and size of panes can be changed on the fly, you just have to be careful to not trigger a pane overlap. We have a customer who has a dynamic, collapsible faceplate zone that expands on context selection, and collapses when you go to pages such as the Alarm and Trend Pages.

When you say sub pane, do you mean hosting a page with panes in a pane? If so, search "HasPanes" in the help and click on the "Use Nested Panes" topic.

Yes it is possible to setup tabs within a faceplate zone.

We have some examples that are in progress to demonstrate various workspace customisations and get people familiar with all its hook points and tricks.

I need to work out how to get some examples to you in the mean time (including the custom list one you were after)

bradley

we managed to setup a popup pane (using WinNewAt) with nested sub panes (as you suggested). however we are also considering the use of the subpane within the content pane itself (not a pop up) but i'm having difficulty trying to figure out how to do that. because we only want to show the subpanes in a few overview pages but not all content pages. looking at the explanation in the help guide, it sort of indicates that i need to change my content pane to accomodate the subpane. but the content pane is in the master? so if i am unable to change master then i'm kinda stuck with the content and the sub pane for all pages? is there anyway to overcome this?

Yep, so how you do that is that you keep your master page as normal. Then for the "few" overview pages that need subpanes, you:

1. Add panes to just those overview pages along with your normal graphical objects.
2. Configure the panes to behave how you want. E.g. FillMode = Autofill
2. Set 'HasPanes' = 1 on those overview pages.

That's it. When you select objects on your pane enabled overview pages, you will see the content in the panes get updated.

bradley

For us, we are finding that this is very restrictive in our remote control center where we need to control each plant form any screen. We might be going back to the older Tab style. I need a way to change to tabs in the Navigation pane during runtime from the Home page.

I see the same point as Chris.

At this moment we have independent locations (Plants) who are running a standalone configuration on a derivative of the tab style template. When I’m thinking about migrating to SA and combining the different Plants to Site configuration, I think a way to update the navigation pane is needed.

Thijs-Jan

Hi Thijs-Jan,
It is a pity this functionality is not available in the Situational Awareness Project today. I believe it is on the backlog and we hope to add it to the product in the near future. I believe there could be a work around, which could be Engineered today:
1. Write to the Citect.ini file (modify the Context)
2. Logout Current User
3. Login.
This will reload the new Context from the Citect.ini file.
There are probably ways to hook into the Workspace startup and reload more, including the Master page and Screen Profile.
Kind regards
Olivier

Hi guys,

I can confirm that this functionality is part of our backlog of work for the workspace. I just can't confirm when it will be prioritised in.

From memory Oli, it requires a little bit more than that.

bradley

Bradly,

It's been about 3 months now, any update on this functionality, switching the workspace during runtime? I am about to start testing some of the "hacks" or "work arounds" very soon. We are planning a full re-design of our 24 hour operations center using the SA style templates. We are currently testing on the latest CitectSCADA release.

Regards, Chris

Hi Chris,

Can I clarify which capability you are after here?
1. Switching a Master Page for a given workspace/screen
2. Switching the root context for a given workspace (i.e. switching between Level 1 entries in the Navigation Menu)

The only update I can give, is that both of them are not slated in the next 3 months. One of the guys on this forum, Bas, has built support for switching of the Master Pages. I have not analysed his code to verify there is no harm to the use cases of the workspace.
The second one is a bit more complex and most likely intrusive to the workspace's core code.

I am interested in the use case you have for switching Master page? I am guessing it is associated with either the Alarm or Trend Pages?

bradley

Bradley,

Thank you for the reply.

Okay, I'll try my best to explain, but keep in mind I'm only talking about the clients below...

We have several sites (8), each with their own master project and includes. Each site runs it's own master project on one client machine for local control of the site with 2/3 monitors, there is no issues with that because the site personnel only needs control of that one site. The issue comes in at our remote 24 hour desk operations center where all 8 sites are controlled primarily from where we combine the all of the site's master projects into a master/master project and run that. We are currently using the old Tab Style templates, we have a top most menu items that are the site's names, when those are selected, it updates (shows) the second level menu items for the individual screens for the site. Easy to navigate from site to site, no mater if you have one monitor or eight per client.

The SA Style system does not allow us to switch sites as the context (root level) is locked during runtime. Meaning that the navigation is pinned/locked to a certain site and requires a shutdown-reconfig-restart of the client runtime. This is a HUGE problem for us. First is simple redundancy, we have four client machines that can display any site's screens on the fly if one of the machines goes down. Second is upgrades, we need to take a client down when performing upgrades/updates, pushing a project update, or even simple Windows updates which can take a long time to complete at times.

We feel that Citect did good overall on the SA style project template to better fit ISA standard out of the box, but there are some areas like the one mentioned above that need attention to better fit the industry and to be flexible. We are bringing on a new site using the SA style system because is all green field work and will be migrating our older system as time goes on.

Also, our new site has a lot of replicated equipment, only the cluster changes, I has found that the new composite genies don't play nice at all. We'd like to have one graphics display for both "units" and just switch the cluster context, this does not work. So we need to double the work and maintain two of the exact copies (minus the cluster name prefix in the genies). Though, I kinda get it, the system needs to know which graphics display to navigate to when drilling into the navigation when chasing alarms, but it gets to be a lot of extra development work.

I hope I have helped you better see the issues we are facing.

Regards,

Chris