Now the last of the 5 dynamic objects - we looked
at XYPlot, Trend, Bar Graph, Value, etc. The last
one is something we call a Multi-State symbol.
And let me just demonstrate this very simply. I'm
going to create a little circle here.
And that circle I would like to change color
every time this Value goes above, say
80 and below 20. The way to do that
is by looking at this or selecting that object,
and then choosing this option over here called
Multi-State symbol. Now, you can also
choose Edit from the Edit Menu, the option called
Multi-State. That's not under the Draw Menu. That's under the Edit
Menu. Either way, when you either choose
that Edit Multi-State or you choose this little icon here,
what your presented with is a dialog box in which you can
specify the tag whose Value will determine
what the, whose Value is going to determine
what color this is. Now,
in this case I've selected a,
an object that is not associated with any other tag, so
it seems pretty obvious I can choose anything I want. Right?
Well, interesting thing to mention, if you choose
one of these other things, like for example, let's look at this,
this Value right here, or this Bar Graph.
If you choose one of these, you can also make that into
a Multi-State, and in that case you can also choose
whichever tag you want. You don't have to have
the Value, or the color of this Value,
determined by the Value of that tag.
It can be for any tag. So, that's the first point to make
is you can choose any tag that will be the trigger for this Multi-State.
Now, I'll go ahead and choose this again, and for the
tag, well I'll use that one I used for so many other
things. We'll take a look at that tag called Sinusoid.
We'll say when it goes below, err, when it
goes above 80 we'll see a specific
Value, below 20-- a different Value.
Now I've selected that as Sinusoid. We've retrieved it
and we've also retrieved some information about this tag.
We know, for example, it goes from zero
to 100. That's the range.
Now, by default, it divides this into 3, or,
2 states, but you can control this to make this as many
states as you want. I'm going to choose 3,
and for State 1, I would like that,
that's the least State here, the smallest number.
I want this to extend from zero to 20.
You notice all these things adjust as we do this. We see the preview.
For State 3,
excuse me, for State 2, I'd like to go from 20 to
80.
And, then this adjusts appropriately
for State 3. State 3, as you can three, as
see, automatically adjusts from 80 to a hundred. Now what I didn't
do yet is specify the colors.
For the color, this is how I can specify
it. Let's say this is going to be -- we'll go
with Green for Low. For the
center color, State 2,
we'll go with, let's just go with
Blue, and for the High
color we'll go with Red.
There we go. So once I've done that, I'll go ahead
and say OK.. And at this point now I can demonstrate this
behavior by scrolling back and forth. As you can see
when it goes below 20, the Value here goes Green.
When it goes above 20,
it goes to Blue. Above 80, it goes to Red.
So, that's our Multi-State.
We could have done exactly the
same thing over here, to this Value
here. I could have specified the same type of
Multi-State, in which case we would see -- let me go ahead and make this
bolder so it's easier to see -- in which case
we can base it on the tag itself
or on a different tag if we choose. So, we'll do
3 states:
zero to 20, 20 to 80,
and then we'll set the colors. Color for this,
let's go with the Green.
Blue,
and Red.
So now we should see these
track each other. You know so that when this turns Blue, this
turns Blue, and vice versa, turns Green, etc.
So just about any object
can be a Multi-State except a Trend itself. a
graphic that you've imported - we can't change the buttons.
Also any OLE objects cannot change their,
their color. But just about anything else can.
If you noticed on our previous
demo we saw on that main
column, bottom display, there were a number of bar graphs that were
changing colors. And that's how we did it, with a Multi-State.
Now there's a couple of options that we've ignored so far. Let's
go back into the Multi-State definition. I'll select
this, because this is where I believe it makes most sense.
We would like to specify a color for bad data.
So, in other words, if this Value
of this tag is unavailable, we would like that color to be,
or to show up. So, for example, I'll go with a Dull Gray,
and the way to demonstrate
this would be to scroll off into the future,
and, as you can see, when I scroll off into the future,
there's essentially no data here. And notice how nice this is. It's
kind of grayed out, so it gives us a nice
indicator, visually, that there's, there's something
wrong happening in there. And that was done through the Multi-State.
We can also specify that when the data
is bad we can force this to blink as well.
And that's an option that's available for
all of these. So, for example, for --
I think I'll have it blink when it's bad and blink when it's
too high. There we go. So
State 3 should blink this for me.
I'll do that for that. I can also do
this over here for this as well.
We'll go with blink for that.
So, the big
finish to this would be - let's see what happens when we go above
80. Let me scroll in so that we can
do this a little better. And,
there we go. So going above 80 we now see that
this is blinking, getting our attention.
We'll conclude this by showing you how to remove all this.
If I go into the Multi-State definition, this
Convert to Static simply converts this back to the
way it was before.