In this Section
we will tackle the PI ProcessBook Application.
We will learn how to use the ProcessBook
workbooks, learn how to visualize live data,
learn how to create our own workbooks and displays, and be
able to use PI calculation and ODBC datasets.
So what is PI ProcessBook? Well,
PI ProcessBook is an application that
allows users to view their
live process data from anywhere in the organization.
They can view it in the form of live updating Values
or Trends, a lot of different methodologies
for viewing data in real-time.
ProcessBook also includes Visual Basic for
Applications, or VBA, as a development environment.
This means that if ProcessBook will not do
something that you need it to do natively, it's probably
very easy to write a script or bring in an
Active X control to do what you need it to
do right at your workstation.
ProcessBook is built on a Standard Windows Structure
which means it's got the expected Menus and
Toolbars where you expect to find them. For
example, Save is under the File Menu, and so forth.
The one difference ProcessBook has that
many other applications do not is that it's got two
modes, or two faces. One is called
Run Mode and one is called Build Mode, and these are
accessed from the Toolbar in ProcessBook. If
we bring up ProcessBook, you can see the buttons at the top
here. There's an arrow for Run Mode and a hammer
for Build Mode. And, the reason
these are here is because ProcessBook,
instead of having a separate Editor and Viewer,
we have decided to produce one application
where you can either put the application into Edit
Mode -- we call that Build Mode -- or you can put the application
in View Mode which we refer to as
Run Mode. We will see examples of this
in the next segment.
Let's first take a look at Run Mode in ProcessBook.
And, to view a ProcessBook
Display, we will have to open it. So, let's look at some of the issues
involved in opening a Display.
Here I have started up ProcessBook, and you will notice that there is a
File open that's called PIDEMO.PIW.
That is the Demo Workbook that
comes with all ProcessBook installations. And
unless you change the
direction or the pointer to the default workbook
to something else, this is what you will get when you just open
up ProcessBook without actually specifying a
file to open. You will get this PIDEMO
Workbook. We will show you how to change the default
workbook a little bit later in the course. For right now, let's look
at PIDEMO, and we see we have over here on the right, we have some,
we have some what look like File Folder Tabs. Each
Tab is individually color-coded, and as
we click on them, you will see that the contents
of each page is displayed over on the left.
So let's look at the tab we have called
Refinery, and I have got a sample
display document here called Main Column Bottom.
And, this Main
Column Bottom -- there are two ways
in which I can, I can open it. And you will notice those are
displayed at the bottom here. I have New and I have Open, and
by the way, both of these work in Run Mode.
And, if you click on the Main Column Bottom
and then click the Open Button, you
will get the Display open up in a window.
If you select a different display and
click open, you will get that display open in the same
window. If you want two displays open at the same time,
you would select them one-by-one
and click the New Button. New Button
will open the display in a new window, while the Open
Button will open the display in
the same window, or the last window that
you used. So, that's the difference between New
and Open. And what we have got here is
a display open called Main Column Bottom.
We will use the Main Column Bottom for the remainder of the discussion
of Run Mode. Main Column Bottom
Display is a good display to use for the Run Mode
demonstrations because of a couple different reasons.
First, it's on virtually every
system that has ProcessBook, and
the display points to a specific
tag that is one of the random
data generator tags that we call Test Tags on the PI Server.
So, virtually everybody that has ProcessBook has
this Column Bottom Display, and the display
works with almost every Pi System out there.
Now the Main Column Bottom Display is nice
for another reason in that it is
a good representative mixture of all of the
various components of ProcessBook, and those are
generally divided into two Categories: Static
Elements and Dynamic Elements.
We have got the three Standard Dynamic Elements shown here
as a Trend. You can see the Crude Charge
Trend here. And we have got some bar graphs which
are shown over the Tanks as
Level Indicators. That's a very common use for a bar graph,
to superimpose it over the picture of a Tanks as a
Level Indicator. And then we have the Dynamic
Values that are scattered around the screen.
Now the one unique thing about this diagram is that all of the
Dynamic Elements on the screen point to a specific
tag, so they are all going to read the same thing.
But, it is still a representative
graphic with all of the Dynamic
Elements that are normally found in a display
as well as many Static Graphics. I have got some lines,
I have got some Tanks, I have got a large
col... main column here, and I have got some
Text Labels. So, there's a lot of different
Static Graphics on this diagram as well.