These items on the display here are Values.
It's a Value of a PI tag. It's simply showing us a
Current Value. And, it's only showing the Value, not
the Timestamp or the Tag Name. And, those are Options we're going to
add right now. So, let's go into a brand new display.
And, let's add some Values.
As we've done before, we can
start by going into Build Mode and going into
the Data Favorites, and switching this over to
specify Value. And what this
does is it simply allows us to drag these over and
create Value Objects. If you double click on them you'll see
the Builder Screen. Now, let me delete these.
And, I'll just go ahead and create a Value from scratch.
I'll close the Data Favorites now. You
can go into Draw, and within Draw there's an option
called Value. That's
the same as you'll see on this button, this little 1, 2,
3 button. Click here and then
click at the location where you want the button to appear.
Now that's very important. Let me just make, make a point
of this. I'll draw a little intersection here.
Here's a line, here's another line. And watch
where the Value appears when I,
when I position my cursor.
I'm going to position my cursor right here at the intersection.
Now that's going to be,
if I remember correctly, I believe that's the bottom left corner,
of, or excuse me, the, yeah, the bottom left corner of
the Value. Let's see if I'm correct. Oop, I'm
sorry, top left corner of the Value. So, that's
where you're going to, you know, when you're positioning these on the screen, that's
how you'll find it. The top left corner's where your
Value will appear. Now that's going to be the same whether you put
Timestamps on it or not. That's
always going to be the top left corner for positioning purposes.
Now, as you can see, you can choose to put none of those
or all of those. You can choose where
you're going to put those. I can put them on the left, the right, the top, the bottom.
End up with something like that.
And you can
choose, specify what the format is going to be of your number.
So, for example, let me, let's put
the Tag Name at the bottom, Timestamp at the bottom.
Using this preview I can see what I'm going to get there.
And, I'm going to specify this as 1 decimal place.
Now, I would strongly recommend you carefully consider your
decimal places. Yeah, there we go.
The 1 decimal place here. Nothing destroys the credibility of a system
like Pi quicker than when somebody shows,
oh I don't know, maybe it's a level transmitter, it's that
you know, 1 one-thousandth of an inch
accuracy. Anyway, so, so consider
carefully what you choose for your numbering
format here. Now, in addition,
there is an Option called Database. Database will
simply find whatever's been configured in the PI point database for that
tag. So, by choosing
Database, it's essentially leaving it to whatever
the System Manager has configured. I'm going to set this
up for 1 decimal place. There we go.
Now, because this a,
essentially a text object, if you do need to resize it,
you'll notice that invoking just the regular resizing
handles here, that's actually going to go
ahead and launch the Windows convention for
changing font size. So, you know, this is, these are Windows,
part of the, you know, the Windows standard, so that's
how we choose to use these.
And, of course, all those other things associated with Windows
objects are available as well. I can bold it, I can make it italics,
I can underline it, etc. So
this is, you know, these are the options that are available to you.
Let me go ahead and switch this to 14 pt. I wanted to make
the point, also, that there are two colors associated with
this. There's the line color and then there's the
background color. So for the line color, that's
essentially going to be the text. The background color's going to be the
color that I'm using in the background.
There we go.
Okay, I'd like to do a quick summary of the three
dynamic objects we've worked with already. We've
worked with the Trend, the Bar Graph, and the
Value so far. I'll create a brand new display. And, I'll
add this for Sinusoid for each of those.
And I think the easiest way to do it, by far, is to use the
Data Favorites, so I'll go ahead and use Data Favorites. First
I'm going to set up a Trend.
I'll drag this over, drop it right there. Here's my Trend.
I can modify this as I need to by double clicking.
For example, put in the crop, proper plot name,
[typing]
etc. The second
thing I can do is let me add a bar graph. So I'll switch over
to Bar. Same thing, Sinusoid, drag
that over here, and then format it the way I
want. I think I'll put that right about here.
So it's going to track -- let's have
it track exactly what the Trend is doing.
Let's make it zero in
Span-Match what we see in the Trend.
And to do that I'm going to change
this, too. Instead of Auto Range, let's change this to
Database. Okay. So,
what we should see now, as we scroll backward and forward,
is that Value and the Trend Value should always
parallel each other, and that's what we're seeing here.
Kind of
illustrates the point that the Bar Graph and the Value
are going to take the Timestamp of whatever the End Time of the
Trend is. Now,
the last thing I'm going to do is add a Value. So, I'll go ahead and choose
Value. Bring Sinusoid down here. It's going to
take whatever configuration was most recent. In this case,
it was that full configuration with the Tag,
the Value, the Tag Name and the Timestamp underneath.
Now with this here I certainly don't need to put that over here
anymore. So I can get rid of the Value.
There we go.
And the Tag Name.
There we go.
Now, just as with the Bar Graph, if
I were to, let's say for example, I were to zoom in here
and then select nothing, as I scroll backward and forward
on this, then all of the
objects on here, including the Value and the Bar Graph, they're all going to take
the Timestamp of the End Time. So, 331, 331,
etc.
As a builder of these displays, one last
things, one last thing you should consider is if
you do have multiple Trends on display like
let's go ahead and add a second Trend here. I'll change the
Tag Name to something else. If you've got
multiple Trends on the display,
you may then wonder, okay, with 2
Trends on here, which Trend is going to be the,
kind of the anchor for the,
the Time Span as we scroll backward and forward?
And the point I wanted to make is
that it's the Trend that's on the, the lowest part of the redrawing order.
So let me put this Trend right here.
See if I were to now zoom in on
this Trend, and then select nothing, as I
scroll you may wonder which End
Time are we using? As you can see, it's the End Time of the
Trend that's on the, the lowest on the redrawing order.
That's because that ends up being the first
Trend. So, we need to choose something. We chose the
first Trend which is likely to be the one that's lowest on
the redrawing order. So that becomes the anchor
point, kind of the decider for
which, whose End Time is used for the Bar Graphs and the
Values.