Top 8 improvements for System Platform/InTouch OMI

My top 8 improvements for System Platform (as at 2017 SP1):

  1. Overrides are not applied to object graphics, unless the graphic is embedded in a host graphic.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a priority.  This means that if your object's graphics are altered by overrides, you can't display them directly in a OMI pane, popup window, or in the presenter app.  The only workaround is to create a symbol for each object graphic and embed the object graphic into it.
    UPDATE: This is apparently in the pipeline for whatever follows 2017 Update 2 (Update 3 presumably?)  Q4 2018
  2. The new alarm app doesn't have a column for the attribute description.  The alarm comment field does contain the description, but when you acknowledge the alarm it is overwritten either with a user comment or a fixed value.  In InTouch the alarm client can be scripted to keep the description in place, but there is no scripting ability in OMI.
    UPDATE: This is apparently fixed in 2017 Update 2
  3. When changing the navigation item in a graphic  script, it is done asynchronously.  This means that you cant change the navigation item programmatically then immediately show a graphic, because the autonavigation will kick in after your graphic is shown and close it again.
  4. Graphics shown on the map have no ability to be clicked on and navigate to a graphic in place of the map.  The only option to achieve this functionality is to use autonavigation which is not desirable in many cases.
    UPDATE: This is possibly fixed in 2017 Update 2...
  5. Windows that were opened in a multitabbed pane, are closed when the navigation object is changed.  There should be an option to keep these open.
  6. Multiple screens should have an option to have a separate navigation session for each screen.  The whole point of having multiple screens is that sometimes you want to see two different things at once.
    UPDATE: This has been noted and is being worked on for a future release
  7. IDE performance is terrible when checking in complex templates with many children.  One of my templates has 120 attributes, and 100 choices/options, and 100 children templates/instances.  It takes 10 minutes to check in which is painful.  It will be many times worse when I go to implement the rest of the 200 instances that I haven't done yet.  Complex templates also takes quite a while open in the IDE, but at least when it's open it is reasonably responsive.
  8. Sometimes data subscriptions get stuck, and are paused for about 30 seconds before completing.
    UPDATE: This can be fixed by deleting all your objects and importing them all again.  Hopefully this has been fixed in update 2...

| February 8th, 2018 | Posted in SCADA |

2 Responses to “Top 8 improvements for System Platform/InTouch OMI”

  1. Sam Says:
    July 16th, 2020 at 10:22 am

    we are dealing with the issue of the alarm description disappearing once you acknowledge. We have update 3 Sp1. There is a check box on the alarm object to, "use description as commnet" and we disabled the default comment, but it still prompts the user for a comment. We are deploying the system at a user site, and it would be really great to figure this out. Tech support is useless. Any ideas?

  2. Raggles Says:
    July 16th, 2020 at 4:33 pm

    Yes I vaguely remember coming across that during the WSP2017 test program, but I can't remember if we ever had a workaround/solution for it. I've moved on from System Platform these days so unfortunately I can't be of much help. In our system we did alarm acknowledgement with scripting so it wasn't really much of an issue.

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