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 Youssef.El-Bahtimy:
Just to be clear we do not want multiple instances of one face plate for a single module. During start up and shut down our operators would like to have access to multiple modules and multiple face plates at the same time.
Currently, we can have more than one instance of a face plate open.
We have found some discrepancies between our work stations. Some workstations can only have four different face plates pinned at one time, where as others can have up to 10 face plates pinned at one time. Ideally we would like to have up to 15 face plates pinned at once.
We would like to know if there is a set number or limit on face plates able to be pinned that we can change anywhere.
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.
Thank you to Youssef and Matt, you both answered the question. Both of your responses together allowed me to understand what needed to be done in order to gain more face plates. I didn't understand that we needed to save a copy of face plates in the temp folder in order to accomplish this. Like Matt said, we can now have up to "X-1" face plates.
Again, Thank you very much.
Josh
Thanks everyone, awesome example of collaborative problem solving!
Best Regards,
Rachelle McWright: Business Development Manager, Dynamic Simulation: U.S. Gulf Coast
I would be cautious of creating more than 3 copies of the faceplates without some additional controls. The update popup pictures utility in operate configure will search through all the faceplates and replicate the ones that are required. If you have more than the standard amount of faceplates (3 copies) you may need to create some vb script to replace this function so all the faceplate copies are updated.
Unless you do this you may end up with out of date faceplates. example faceplatex is updated. You run update popup pictures and faceplatex1, faceplatex2 and faceplatex3 are updated automatically. Faceplatex4, faceplatex5 and faceplatex6 will still have the old configuration.
In reply to Steve Linehan:
I agree with Steve on this; not something you want to do manually. I believe the frsvariable.misc_glb.gn_CopyNumber variable controls the number of copies made. I haven't tested this, however, and I have only checked v 11.3.1.
In the code behind the 'update popup pictures' -button there is a mix of hardcoded number 3 and frsvariable.misc_glb.gn_CopyNumber.CurrentValue that Youssef mentioned. Increasing this value will create the extra copies, i.e. fp4 and over. Only the progress-bar isn't accurate anymore because it uses the factor '3'.