The first time you open PI ProcessBook, you are met with all of the
program's default settings. The default homepage
will pop up and all of your toolbars
will have a default look to them. And when you go to
build a display, your display and all of the symbols
on it will take on the default look until you change the colors and sizes
manually. In this video we'll be making
changes to our PI ProcessBook settings and
defaults so that whether we are building new
displays or connecting to a PI data archive to use a
display that's already been made for us, our defaults should
reflect how we are likely to use PI ProcessBook. And
ultimately save us time down the road.
The first thing we can do is set the default connection
to the PI Data Archive. When PI ProcessBook
or a previous program that uses the PI
SDK as installing, it'll ask you to specify
a PI Data Archive to connect to. And
that will remain your default until you change it.
In order to chance it here
in file, connections, we are met with a list
of PI Data Archives that the machine knows about.
The ones we are connected to will be
indicated by a check mark and if we want to change the
default connection here in tools, options,
we can use the pull down menu in the default server settings.
Since I'm interested in
leaving it at LVRPISRV I'll click
OK and then close.
Next up we'll decide the
default PI AF Server and PI AF database to connect to.
Here in file, PI
Systems,
we are met with the select database
window where we can see the database of our default PI AF
Server. If we want to change or add a PI
AF Server to connect to, we can show this
list and right click and add an asset server.
If the asset servers we are currently connected to
are indicated by these green dots and the
default PI AF Server as indicated by this black check mark.
If I wanted to change the default,
I could right click and set a different default
AF Server. Since I'm interested
in letting the LRNPISRV2 remain my
default I'll close. And here I
can see that this database is my
default AF database as indicated by this black
check mark. Since this is also what I
want, I'll simply close this window as well.
Next I'll set the layout of my toolbars
to make them look how I want them to. Toolbars
can simply be dragged and dropped
by clicking on these handles and letting them go where
you want them to be. You can also show and hide
toolbars here in the view toolbar
menu where we can select or unselect and have the
toolbars hide and appear immediately.
So if I'm no longer interested in seeing my layout
toolbar, simply clicking layout will hide that for
me. Next we'll set
our tools preferences.
This menu will have some options that will
dictate how PI ProcessBook will behave
in general. And it'll have some tabs that will decide
the defaults that PI ProcessBook will use to create new displays and symbols.
Here in the general tab, these are
all options that will decide how PI ProcessBook
behaves in general. So for instance
here is the start-up file that will open every time PI ProcessBook
does. We can change this by browsing
to a different PDI or PIW file.
And clicking open.
Another option of note on this page is the preferred run mode
check box. While prefer run mode is checked,
anytime you finish building a symbol in build mode, you'll
automatically return to run mode. Additionally
anytime you open up PI ProcessBook you'll
also find yourself in run mode. If you plan on buidling
a lot of symbols or displays back to back,
I'd recommend taking run mode off. But if you are
intending to just consume displays, preferring
run mode is ideal. Next we
can set our date and time formats.
So this will decide how our timestamps look and
whether they show subseconds or not. And we can
choose to see the events as they appear on the
client machine's timezone or the PI Server or PI Data Archive's
timezone. This is only really a useful distinction
when your PI Data Archive and client machine are
in different timezones.
If you want to know what some of these other
options do, in our PI Live Library, you
can search for the preference setting in the PI ProcessBook
2015 library. Here we can see the exact
technical details of every check mark
in this menu.
Next we'll talk about our table of contents
tab. This tab will decide how PI ProcessBook
will display PI ProcessBook
book files or PIW files.
We can define how each entry level will
look within PI ProcessBook. So if
we want our level 1 entries that are our
titles to be bigger than our level 2
entries, we can simply click level 1 and
make them size 16. And then
applying will update the look instantly.
This is because this page will decide how
PI ProcessBook will display the book files.
Next we'll talk about our display
window, our trend and our trend elements.
This tab will decide
all the defaults of your displays and the symbols that you
create on those displays. For instance this
display was made with the defaults with a
grey background. It has white lines and
text. And fill colors, I'm using blue.
If I was
to change my background to white
and lines to black,
I'll change my fill color to green. And
then remove the symbol background
color. And then change the font to something like
impact. Clicking apply
won't actually affect any display that already exists.
That's because this display
window will only set the defaults of any symbols or
displays that I create new.
The same is true for my trend and my trend elements
tab which look a lot like the define trend tab when you
double click on a trend in build mode. For instance
if I don't want to see a legend by default
but I do want to see markers, and instead of an
8 hour time by default, I want to see a 7 day
time, I can set that here. Clicking apply
again won't actually change the trends
that exist until I create a new trend.
Of course the same is true for my trend
elements. So I can switch my color to
blue and my marker type to boxes.
And likewise hitting
OK the trend won't actually
change. Now here in
file new, I can make a new ProcessBook
display and immediately we can see that it's using
the new background color which I defined as white.
Now when I make a bar graph,
we can see our bar graphs
are now using the green color by default instead of
blue. And they have the black background
and the impact text instead of the white background
and the arial text. Similarly
our trends
will take the blue color by default. And now we can see that we are
using the squares instead of the circles as our
markers. And like always we can go back to
build mode and double click on our symbols in
order to change the definition away from default to something
else.
Another place we can define preferences
is in the PIProcBook.ini
file. Here we can set some of our more advanced settings
and definitions. So I'll recommend using our PI Live
Library and search for the ProcBook.ini
section within the PI ProcessBook 2015
page in order to understand some of our more complex
options that this file has the power to change.
So far in this video we set our
default PI Data Archive, PI
AF Server and then some of our preferences and then the
default style of all of our symbols and book entries.
By making these changes to my installation PI
ProcessBook, I'll be able to make more consistent looking displays
as well as save time by removing the need
to change the look and feel of my displays and symbols over and over again.