In the previous video we saw the simple way of creating a trend using that data favorites
option and in addition of course to building things automatically, you can also build them
manually--these trends. So let's take a look at our first dynamic object, the trend. I'll
create a brand-new display here. It doesn't matter what I name it. It's just going to
be a little temporary workspace. On this workspace I'm going to go ahead and show you the three
different ways you can draw a trend. Well actually the first way is what we've seen
already. Go into data favorites drag and drop and that is if you've selected trend as the
default behavior. So I can go ahead and do that and that generates a trend for me automatically.
In Build mode I can double-click on that and I can see the builder screen for that if you
prefer to just kind of build it automatically and then inspect it later. Now a second way
you can do this--let's close the data favorites--is there's an--in the Draw menu, you'll find
the trend option Draw > Trend and just like all the other objects in ProcessBook when
you choose Draw > Trend you're going to be presented with an icon. You can see it. You
can just barely see it. Let me do that again. Draw > Trend and when I move my cursor it
disappears. Yes. See how that icon changes? The mouse cursor now showing me a trend object.
So that indicates that I'm in trend drawing mode. So I can go ahead and click and drag
open a bounding box. That's going to be, ultimately, the size of the trend that I create so I'll
go ahead and--in this case I'll do a quick and dirty trend. I'll just go ahead and draw
that bounding box. I'm going to type in the name of a tag. Now in this case the tag I'm
going to use is a tagwe use for a lot of testing and training called Sinusoid. Just press return
and choose OK and you'll get the default trend behavior. It will look like that now. We could
have--let me delete that--we could've done it this way: draw a trend and then done a
tag search for the tag instead of typing it in by hand, and we've seen the tag search
before. Simply select the item and then drop it in there. Now, there is another way to
do this and that is with the trend icon. Choosing trend icon is the same thing as choosing draw
trend. We just get a different trend. I'm going to start. Let's put in Sinusoid and
as you can see there are a lot of different attributes that you can configure for the
trend. In this class, in this class material we don't attempt to duplicate everything you'll
find in the regular manual. So we highly suggest you go out to our PI ProcessBook users guide
if you're interested in step-by-step instructions and go to the chapter 5 and there you will
find instructions on creating a trend and this goes over in great detail all of the
different options available to you most of which are obvious. So we are not going to
talk about it in this class but we will go over those things that are not so obvious.
First of all of course you're not limited to a single trace or single PI tag on a trend.
I can type the name of another tag--let's go with CDT158. Or I could do a tag search
for that same tag. Let's go out and look for "cd"--I'll look for CDEP158. Oops. Let me
go ahead and reset this search... I still had some search criteria from my previous
searches. That's why I didn't find that at first. There we go. I can choose that and
as you can see we're going to deposit that right here. When you've chosen this--three
of these trends here--then you have a choice. Do you want single scale or multiple scales?
Multiple scales will have a separate y-axis for each one of these trends. This drop-down
over here allows you to specify what the format is of the y-axis. So the numbers on the y-axis--as
you can see I can choose two decimal places or give that one of these--any of these formats
that you see here. You can specify the start time and the end time and this uses the standard
PI syntax. So for example if this is meant to be yesterday's day shift I can do something
like this. Y + 7 hours to Y + 15 hours and that will consistently every time I look at
this give me yesterday's day shift seven to three. I'll go ahead and choose some of the
defaults here. I'll go with * - 8 hours to the current time. That's going to be the most
recent eight hours. That's the default. Also, you can choose what type of timestamp you
show. I actually prefer the partial timestamp. It gives me a little bit more detail. The
full timestamp will show you the day month year, hour minute second. So I'm going to
go with the partial here. Now some of these other things, these are all fairly straightforward.
Display format allows us to specify whether we want to see a grid or not and the preview
kind of tells the tale here. So for example the tag names: Do you want the tag names to
appear or not? As you can see over here, that's going help you figure out how this is going
to look. Over here you get to choose what orientation we're going to use. Normally it's
going to be the left or right but you can also do vertical trends going up to down,
or down, up, etc. I'll go ahead and choose that. This right here allows you to turn on
and off this plot title that you see right there and I think I'll go ahead and keep that
on for right now. And a very important one to mention here is this markers option. Now
watch what happens in the sample when I choose markers. It shows we have a lot more markers
than just the three we normally see. We call these three that normally appear the colorblind
markers. They normally appear three per trace and they're there simply for those folks that
may be colorblind, or if you're printing to a monochrome device. As you can see you can
map the colors here and the actual icons here--this a diamond, this circle, this filled circle
etc.--you can match that to the appropriate name of the tag. So if you do not choose markers
what you'll see is just three markers per trace simply for distinguishing one trace
from another. Now compare that to selecting markers. When you choose markers for real,
what you end up with is you show one marker for each archive value in that trace. So it's
really a way of showing indicating every single time there's a value that's actually been
stored in the archive for that trace. We'll take a look at the before-and-after on this
in just a second. Trace format gives us an option to--or all the different options for
changing pen colors. For example I don't particularly like the bright green. I'd rather go with
some colors--something found in nature, maybe. Something a little easy on the eyes. You will
get some warnings if you have any duplicates. I think I may have--no I don't think I've
got any duplicates here. You can see this is my pen 1, 2 and 3 and this is also where
you can choose things like the background color. You may see people with different background
colors. This is where they would do that. And then finally layout is rarely used. It's
used in the event that you've decided to use this new plot option to generate more than
one trend at a time. If I do choose new plot what we end up with is now we've got in addition
to plot zero we've got a plot one. And now I can choose what the layout will be. Is it
two rows by one column? One row by two columns? Or how do you want to generate this. So actually
I'm not really interested in doing that. I don't find a lot of people using this right
from the start. It's more of advanced feature to generate a lot of traces at once, all of
the same size and shape, and you can go ahead and specify the field the number of rows across
and then you can have extra columns and rows at the top and bottom to get some you know
really flexible formatting, if you're interested in generating many plots at once. I find more
people simply just create the plots they need one at a time. I'm going to go ahead and delete
that plot. I don't need that. OK, now that I'm done with the configuration let's go ahead
and say OK. We'll take a look at what this looks like. As you can see I've turned that
markers on and with markers on were getting a little marker at each time there's a value
in the archive. That's not the default. Normally markers is turned off. So we would normally
only see three per plot--that's the so-called colorblind markers. And the other thing that's
a little different on this is I had turned off the grid. So normally by default you'll
see the grid turned on. Now all of these things can be--you can choose your preferences as
to how you actually--what the defaults actually are. If you go into tools preferences trend
you can actually set these defaults. So if you want some different timestamp as the default
or some different marker behavior or different grid behavior you can do that. A couple of
other points to make. Notice the partial timestamp down here 3, 4, 5, etc. That partial timestamp
will change as I make this bigger. Now that's a little different. As I said you have the
option in here to do that full or partial--there's the full timestamp. You can even make it relative.
It's going to be relative from the current time--the end time I should say. So this is
going back seven hours for example. Let me go ahead and set this back to the full timestamp.
By the way notice here we've got the plot title. It ends up defaulting to plot zero.
To change that I'll just go in here and modify this. Call it, let's say, "this is a test
for training" and that now becomes my plot title.