It would not do much good to
track all the Batch information in your system
without having tools that allow you -- would allow you to see the
Batch information and actually do some
comparative analysis between runs.
And so, in this section, we are going to talk about the Client Tools.
We have a lot of different Client Tools.
Our main Client Tools, generic Client
Tools, are considered ProcessBook, PI DataLink and
RtWebParts. And
we have specific Batch-related tools.
There's PI BatchView which we will be talking about in this
class. There's also a product that is marketed
by a partner of ours called PI ProcessTemplates.
And then there's something we have called RtReports
that allow you to do Batch reporting. That's
in another course. Of course,
any custom application that you have written or
any application using ODBC or OLEDB
can get Batch data
out of the PI System. One of the main
ways people use BatchView is in its
form as an add-in to ProcessBook. And, Processbook
is
talked about and discussed in many of our classes.
I would like to just take a few moments and
explain some of the features of ProcessBook for people that
are not familiar with the tool. I, I have opened up
ProcessBook, but I do not have a file open yet.
So, I am going to select File and New and I am going to
create a new Display File. A Display File
is what people use to view data.
Now once I get my
Display File open, I can maximize it.
And, there are two types of elements that you can
put on this screen. I, I am going to click on
the little hammer to go into Build Mode. And then, the Draw Menu
exposes all of the elements that we have
available in this ProcessBook Display.
And you can see that
there are a combination of
static and dynamic elements. There are the
common static elements like Rectangle.
All I did was click on Rectangle and then drew a Rectangle
on the screen. I can -- you, you noticed that
it went back into Run Mode. This is the arrow. I can
go into Build Mode, single-click on this element,
and resize it or move it or
do anything I wish with it.
But ProcessBook is not just known for the little static
graphics that it can display. ProcessBook is known
for its dynamic elements. And one of the most common dynamic
elements is the Trend. So, I will select Draw and Trend.
I will then draw a box
on the screen, and I get my Defined Trend Dialog Box.
And the Defined Trend Dialog Box is going to ask
you three things. It's going to ask you what the data, or tags,
are; the Scale, which is
the Vertical, or
Y Axis; and the Time, which is your
X Axis. And you can the Default is to look back over
eight hours. Well, if I do a Tag Search and I
go and get a, a tag --I have
some Batch Simulation Tags that
start with the letters BA:. So, I am going to type in BA:
and an *, which means wild card, and I am going to
look at this BA:Temp Tag. This is a,
a tag that measures the temperature in my Batch Reactor.
And I can see that
over the last eight hours, I have had a series of
Batch Runs. I have got, one, two, three,
four, five, six, and it looks like
because I am at zero, I am between Runs. I have got six Batch
Runs, and I can see
that I have a process that looks fairly repeatable,
but in the standard ProcessBook Trend,
it's a little bit difficult to see any variations
between these. I can sort of see that there are variations
visually, but it's hard because they are sequenced over
time. A little bit later we are going to show you how to draw
a Special Trend. We using our BatchView product
that allows you to overlay these Trends and you can
clearly and easily see how they look when
superimposed over one another.
PI DataLink is one of our Client Tools.
It's one of our most popular tools. And it's an
add-in to Microsoft Excel. We also have a Lotus 1-2-3
add-in. And, it exposes
itself in a menu in Excel. And, if I open up
Excel, and I click under Add-ins, you can
see that we have PI and PI SMT. The Pi
SMT is our System Manager Tools. We are going to ignore those for,
for this discussion. But, if I click on the PI Menu,
I can see all of the PI DataLink Functions, and
if I have BatchView installed, I will see Batch Search at
the top. So, what do people use DataLink
for? Well, primarily to retrieve data from
the PI System. If I wanted to retrieve the last hour's
worth of data for a given tag, I would select
the Compressed Data, Start Time-End Time Function.
And you will notice, it's going to ask me for Tag Name,
PI Server, Start Time and End time. So
let's put a Tag Name of sinusoid in.
For the Start Time, we will go back minus
one hour. The * minus one hour means Now
minus one hour. And the End Time is Now.
This will give me the last 60 minutes worth of values
from the PI Server. And, I want to make sure
that I show my Timestamps. I will click OK.
And you can see that over the last hour for this
given tag, I have two values.
So, you can see where the PI DataLink
Function would be very valuable to someone who wants to see
data in the PI System, whether it be over the last hour
or over the last eight hours. We are going to see
in this section of the class how to specifically use the
Batch Search Function to look at Batch-
type data in a Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet format. PI BatchView
takes data that would normally be presented
over time
and it breaks it out by its Start Times and End Times.
As you can see in this diagram, we have got some
data and it clearly represents some
data that is in Repeatable Time Segments.
We have got four Runs, or Batches,
here that can clearly be analyzed
against one another as opposed to just
against time. And that's what
PI BatchView does. PI BatchView
looks at process data
framed in terms of a Start Time and End Time. And this is
a, a shot of the PI BatchView
Batch Group in ProcessBook where we have a Search Function,
a Results, a Gantt Chart, and finally
Trend Objects. And this is showing data
that's much the same as we saw in the previous screen
but this data is organized so
you are comparing one Run to another as
opposed to just data over time.
Now the PI BatchView Add-in or Product
comes actually in three distinct
visible components. There is a Quick Search Tool.
If you just want to see some Batch data without
having to open up one of your Client Tools, you can run the Quick Search.
We have a PI ProcessBook add-in --
which we saw in the earlier screenshot -- that allows
us to see our Batch data. And then we have a,
an add-in for Excel, and it is
integrated with our PI DataLink Product. So
you can have all those three components to see your Batch
data. There's also distributed
ActiveX controls which you can program against as well.