I made a way to chat with teammates around the plant, right inside of DeltaV Live.
It looks like this... just like in a chat window, the chat scrolls up and off the screen. It uses variables in DeltaV Live to collect which user is currently logged in. And I even used some hovering to provide additional information about which station the user is at when they are chatting, the display they are on, etc..
But there's one problem! The chat bar don't clear after entering text, and I haven't been able to figure out a way to do this! Usually, if one is entering a value into a control system, it makes sense that the value stay in the text entry bar. But for chatting, this doesn't make sense. This goes back to a SQL database. In the SQL database, I'm doing a hash to ensure there are no alterations of the data which is provided within the chat. I was even thinking of using the chat as a kind of command bar, where I could use a special character like a tilde to associate actions with keywords. Mice are great and all, but wouldn't it be good to be able to type "~TC-823 !MAN" and flip a loop to manual?
Anyhow, I'm looking for a way to get the chat bar of a text entry to clear in the onEnter action completes. The onEnter function returns void, so right now this isn't possible... Any chance this could get updated so that onEnter can return a blank string to clear the chat text entry bar?
I have this set up right now so that the chat works on any station around a plant. It does require the SQL server data source licensing, but there are other ways to use this... for example, I can use SQL server connectors to update a teams chat remotely. I work for an impact partner, and sometimes customers need to ask us questions. This can show us exactly where we need to look in a control system by passing us additional contextual variables, which helps to drive an excellent customer experience for support.
Most of the logic takes place in a group around the text entry box. I already tried using a variable to store if the 'onEnter' has run sucessfully, but onWrite only updates if another write takes place in the text entry box. It's not an awful user experience right now, but it could be better.
Also, if anyone needs a way to chat with people around a plant, in a way that could be incorporated into a batch record (think notes for example, during process operation) of a GxP operation), NECI can help to implement this in a compliant way.
Thank you,
Bruce