Dear All,
We've recently purchased Emerson's quad monitor workstations and are attempting to pull up more than four face plates per workstation. To my understanding the user can only pin four face plates at one time. If a new face plate is opened, the newly opened faceplate will close one of the pinned face plates. We now have a lot of open real estate with the quad monitors and our operators would like to take advantage of this.
Has anybody worked on or developed such requirements?
If so, please kindly inform and share the details. I have searched the forum as best I could. Please forgive me if this question has already been addressed.
Thank you very much for your help and support.
The ability to open more than 1 instance of a faceplate is controlled by making copies of the faceplate file and putting the file into the temp directory (through the Operate update popup picture utility). You will see faceplatename1, 2, 3.grf in that directory.
If you simply copy one of these and create a faceplatename4.grf through windows explorer, this won't work.
If you open temp/faceplatename3.grf in Operate configure and save as temp/faceplatename4.grf, this DOES work. I have 5 faceplates open at the same time of the same module.
In reply to brown_josh:
When this pushpin functionality is enabled, it allows the operator to have four copies of the same named faceplate open (i.e. MOD_FP).
So this means the operator could have 4 faceplates for motors/valves as well has having 4 faceplates for Analog Inputs, 4 faceplates for Loops, etc. because the Faceplate names would be different for these module types.
As Youssef indicated, you can manually create more faceplates that would increase the number from 4 (original and three copies) to X (original and X-1 copies).
Just keep in mind that system performance is dictated by the number of datalinks of a station and you could get to the point where the system is slow because of the number of Graphics and Faceplates open.
Regards,
Matt
In reply to Matt Stoner:
Yes, for clarification, my statement about having the same module faceplate open 5 times was to make certain that the same faceplate file was indeed being opened 5 times (different modules that are of the same template/class may actually reference different faceplate files, though this isn't normally practiced).
The number of faceplates opened, as Matt stated, is dependent on the faceplate file instances which usually maps to module type/class. Being able to open 15 faceplates of different module types doesn't really tell you if the pop-up replication script ran successfully. The best test is to identify a module that is mapped to each faceplate type, then open multiple copies of that module's faceplate until you reach the limit.