Overview
The Solution Settings interface provides a centralized location for configuring various aspects of your solution. Users can adjust parameters related to licensing requirements to run the solution, Python interpreter paths, among others. This page includes Solution Information, Target Platform and License, Solution Options, Modules in Runtime Process, and Python Interpreter.
Introduction
Projects are the foundation of your automation solutions, encompassing all the necessary components such as tags, screens, scripts, alarms, and more. To help you manage and customize your projects effectively, our platform offers a range of settings and utilities designed to streamline your development experience.
Project settings provide control over essential aspects of your projects, such as communication configurations, user access, and alarm management. These settings allow you to tailor the platform to your specific requirements and ensure seamless integration with external systems.
Utilities further enhance your project management capabilities by offering tools such as the Tag Browser, Database Manager, Event Logger, and Security Manager. These utilities facilitate efficient organization, monitoring, and control of your projects while maintaining a secure and controlled environment.
Together, project settings and utilities in our platform empower you to create robust, scalable, and secure industrial automation solutions to meet the demands of your applications.
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Key Concepts and Terminology
Target Platform
The target platform refers to the operating system and hardware environment on which your project will be deployed and executed. Our platform supports various target platforms, including Windows, Linux, and real-time operating systems, ensuring flexibility and compatibility with a wide range of industrial automation systems.
By selecting the appropriate target platform, you can optimize your project's performance and ensure seamless integration with your existing infrastructure.
Target License
The platform uses a licensing model to provide different levels of functionality and scalability, depending on the needs of your project. The target license determines the features, modules, and tag limits available within a specific project.
We offer several licensing options, catering to various project sizes and complexity levels. By choosing the right target license for your project, you can ensure access to the necessary tools and features while optimizing costs.
Categories
One interesting feature in the software platform is the ability to use Categories to organize and group items on runtime, such as variables, alarms, and trends.
Plugins
Plugins are additional software components that can be integrated into the platform to extend its functionality and compatibility. These plugins can be developed by third-party vendors or even end-users. They enable you to add custom features, support for specific devices, or integration with other software systems.
Our platform provides an SDK (Software Development Kit) that allows developers to create their own plugins, ensuring maximum flexibility and adaptability to meet unique project requirements. By leveraging plugins, you can tailor the platform to fit your specific needs and create highly customized automation solutions.
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Solution Settings User Interface
Access the Solution Settings through Solution
Understanding Project Settings and Utilities
Overview
Access the Project Settings through Project→ Settings to tailor your
solutions to specific requirements and ensure seamless integration with external systems. Here, you'll find the configuration options that apply to the entire solution and you can view and change the solution settings that you configured when you created the solution.
Solution Information: Includes solution information (read-only), such name, file size, description, solution path and tag counters for local and external.
Target Platform and License: Includes options to modify the solution's target platform and enables license customization, allowing you to select the best family and product model for your solution. You can also customize the historian license.
Solution Options: Defines runtime behavior, including language settings in "Culture Info," enabling client-side tasks for WPF applications, and activating diagnostic logging for system analysis.
Run Modules inside main Runtime process: Checkboxes allow the use of script-based tasks and enable the primary communication channel utilized for device interactions.
Python Interpreter: Users must specify the location of the Python interpreter when running Python scripts and tasks within the application. There are two options available: "Local," which refers to a Python installation on the user's machine, and "Server," which points to a Python installation on a remote server.
Settings Configuration
The Solution Settings navigation on Solution
This section is organize in the the following topics:
- Verify the Target Platform
- Customize Settings
- Define Categories
- Import Tag Definitions
- Project Settings
- Export the Project Configuration
- Access the Project History
You can verify the Target Platform, which is set when creating a new project, at Project → Settings. Information such as Product Family, Product Model and Canary Historian are also located at this environment and they are editable even after the project is created.
The Projects Management Tool documentation explains in details the procedure to create a new project, as well as how to select the target platform.
Categories are used to organize and manage various elements of an industrial automation project in a structured and logical manner. By grouping similar components or items under specific categories, you can streamline your project development process and maintain a clean, organized workspace.
Categories can be applied to several elements, including:
- Tags: categories help you to group and organize tags based on their purpose, type, or function. This makes it easier to locate, manage, and monitor the tags during the project development and runtime.
- Alarms: categorizing alarms helps in differentiating alarm types, priorities, and sources, enabling efficient alarm management, filtering, and response.
- Screens: organizing screens into categories allows you to manage various user interfaces, such as operator screens, reports, and diagnostics, in a structured manner.
- Scripts: categorizing scripts helps to group related scripts or functions, facilitating easy navigation, editing, and maintenance.
Check Project Settings for detailed information about how to create categories and assign items to them.
The Import Tag Definitions feature enables you to efficiently import tag information from external sources, such as CSV or Excel files, allowing for quick and easy integration of pre-existing tag definitions into your project, streamlining the development process. Check the Import Tag Wizards for detailed information about this subject.
Add, remove, or configure plugins that extend the functionality of your project, allowing for seamless integration of custom modules and third-party tools to enhance your industrial automation solution.
Create a backup or share your project's settings, such as tags, screens, alarms, and more, facilitating collaboration, version control, and easy migration between different environments.
View and track changes made to your project over time, providing insights into modifications, user actions, and version management, ensuring traceability and effective collaboration throughout the project's lifecycle.
Project Settings Configuration and Utilities Usage
The ProjectSettings navigation on Project Explorer has general settings that applies to the entire project, and Utilities Solution to assist the creating and maintenance of the projectsolution. It includes:
- General Settings
- Categories
- Using Import Wizards
- Managing Plugins
- Exporting Project Contents
- Utilizing the Project History
Solution Information
Includes all the basic information about your solution.
Solution information | |
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Description | A description for the solution. |
Solution | |
The Project Settings page (Project → Settings) has the configuration options that applies to the entire project.
You can view and change the project settings that you configured when you created the project.
Project information | ||
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Field | Description | |
Description | A description for the project. | |
Project Path | Read-only path to the projectsolution. | |
Tag Count | How many tags the project solution has. | Communication Points |
Help URL | This feature allows users to integrate additional support for their solution by adding Help URLs for knowledge bases and documentationHow many communication points the project has. | |
Target Platform and License
Provides an overview for understanding the capabilities and limitations of your selected solution.
Target Platform and License | Field | Description|||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Target Platform | Shows the target platform selected in the project solution creation procedure. | |||
Product Family | A basic description of the product families is Enterprise — Complete FactoryStudio functionality Edge HMI — Use for smaller applications and embedded systems. Express — Use only for test or demonstration purposes. IIoT Gateway — Create a project to work as an OPC server or Data Acquisition Gateway, providing data to other applications from the native protocol drivers. Changing the family settings may cause some configurations to be invalid. For example, some features are only available in the Enterprise version. | |||
ProductFamily and ProductModel | Go to Product Series for information about the options available. When deployment this solution to product, the Product Family and Model select must match your license. | Product Model | The product model is connected with the maximum number of real-time communication points you are allowed on that project. | Project |
Solution Options
Here, the users can fine-tune the following configurations:
Solution Options |
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Field
Culture Info | Select the target language for the runtime application. This setting controls the formatting of dates, numbers, and other information so they are in compliance with the selected language. It is possible to change this setting later. |
Allow Client Tasks (WPF only) | |
Enable Diagnostics Logging
Create a Category
To create a category, go to the Project Explorer modules side-bar and double-click on Categories folder, and add a new one. Informe the category name and description, then click OK.
Assign Items to Categories
To assign items to a category, select the item in the Project Explorer, go to the Properties window, and select the Category tab. From there, you can select the category you want to assign the item to.
Display Categories on the runtime
To display categories on the runtime, you can use the Category Navigator widget. To add the Category Navigator widget, go to the Toolbox, select the Category Navigator widget, and drag and drop it onto the runtime screen.
Organize the Display of Categories
You can customize the display of categories on the runtime by adjusting the properties of the Category Navigator widget. For example, you can set the width and height of the widget, change the font size and color, and specify the order in which categories are displayed.
By using Categories you can organize and group items on runtime, making it easier to manage and navigate through large and complex projects.
You can create a dictionary of Categories to allow classification of engineering objects. Most configuration tables have the Category column, where you can apply one or more categories to that object.
Create user-defined categories labels that you can use as tag metadata. Categories are useful for filtering when creating the project and during runtime.
- Go to Project → Categories.
- Add and edit the desired categories for this project.
In order to apply a Category to a Tag or any other object:
- Open the DataGrid Configuration Table for that object.
- Set the column Category to be visible.
- Edit the contents of that column. It is possible to select multiple rows.
Using Categories on Runtime
The object categories can also be accessed during runtime for filtering and other custom applications from Category.
A list of all the categories that are defined in the project during runtime is available in the property Server.Categories.
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Troubleshooting and Best Practices
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Troubleshooting and Common #Issues
The Historian module may encounter some issues in its operation. Here are some common issues and their troubleshooting:
#Issue
Solution
Best Practices and #Recommendations
To ensure the smooth operation of the Historian module, follow these best practices:
#Best practice
Recommendations
This checkbox allows the execution of client-side tasks in WPF. | |
Diagnostics Log Files Location | This dropdown let's you define the location of diagnostic data, aiding in system analysis and troubleshooting. |
Retentive Database Settings
In the Solution Option, click on the gear icon next to the Retentive Database to open the Edit Database Connection popup window.
Edit Database Connection Popup window | |
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Name | Defines the database connection name. |
Description | A brief overview informing the purpose or specifications of the database connection. |
Provider | Data providers serve as bridges between applications and specific types of databases. While some providers like ODBC and OleDb offer multi-database support, others like OracleClient, SQLClient, SQLite, and PostgreSQL are specialized for their respective databases. |
Database | The databases you can connect to will vary depending on the selected Provider. |
ServerIP | If the database you want to connect to isn't on the local computer, the ServerIP should be the IP address or network name of the computer with the database. If a tunneling service is required to access the remote computer, the TWebServices utility must be enabled and running on the remote computer. |
Test button | To test the connection. |
DataSource | Displays the configuration string used to connect to the SQLite database. This string specifies the file path and name of the database file, directing the system to the correct database location. The format typically follows "Data Source =ExecutionPathAndName.dbRetentive". |
Password | The security key to authenticate and access the database. |
Run Modules Inside Main Runtime Process
Here, the users configure the solution settings related to module executions.
Solution Options | |
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Script Tasks | Enables script-based tasks on the solution. |
First Device Channel | Selects the primary route for communication between a software application and connected devices, ensuring a stable and reliable exchange of data and commands. |
Python Interpreter
Specifies the folder where the Python interpreter is installed.
Python Interpreter | |
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Local | Defines the path for Python installation folder on the local machine. |
Server | Defines the path for Python installation folder on the remote server. |
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