Since IA developers are busy working on Ignition 8.3, the latest update of Ignition — Ignition 8.1.48 — primarily delivers bug fixes and optimizations. That’s why we thought now is the perfect time to break out the release scrapbook and revisit some of the 8.1 release train’s most notable accomplishments. In this blog, we’ll throwback to major updates from the first year of Ignition 8.1’s existence, spanning versions 8.1.0 to 8.1.11.
Even if you’re on the ball and fully updated to Ignition’s latest version, a fond look back at these best-of updates might help you notice if you’re underutilizing any of these powerful features for building control systems. And if you aren’t up to date, this will provide a quick way to review what you’re missing out on.
With that, I invite you to join me as we travel back to the year 2020, when the release train empowered systems integration professionals across the globe by delivering Ignition 8.1.
Perspective Workstation
In Ignition 8.1.0 we brought you Perspective Workstation — a major addition that made it a lot easier to use Perspective with HMIs. Workstation enabled deploying and launching a dedicated application that can contain configurations for all your Perspective sessions. Providing a standalone launcher for Perspective was critical, since launching via a web browser is not ideal for HMIs.
And in 8.1.4 we went further, adding on-screen keyboard support. Since many HMIs don’t have actual keyboards, this made Perspective a viable option in a lot more scenarios.
Then, in 8.1.6 we decided to migrate Vision’s popular local client fallback feature into Perspective. The addition of fallback support was hugely helpful for providing continued functionality at remote sites. If Workstation was running at a remote location and communication with the hub gateway dropped, it could redirect to a local gateway instead.
Ultimately the addition of Perspective Workstation had a big impact on Ignition users, and it has since become the de-facto way to launch Perspective sessions on HMIs. Check out the “Perspective Workstation” lesson in Inductive University to learn more about it.
Perspective Power Chart
With 8.1’s launch also came the exciting introduction of the Power Chart — a user-friendly way to quickly create runtime-configurable time-series charts from Tag Historian data. The Power Chart is highly appealing to Ignition users because operators can heavily modify it from the session, it’s mobile-optimized, and using it is similar to using Vision’s Easy Chart (i.e., incredibly easy). It includes a ton of helpful features such as runtime-configurable pens, axes, and subplots; a built-in tag browser; and a brush mode for highlighting ranges with built-in calculations.
Along with the Power Chart we also added a new DB Table Historian profile type. This enables you to turn “wide-table” data into tag historian data, allowing SQL Bridge data to be treated similar to Tag History pens for trending. This delivered more flexibility by allowing data collected by other means (such as Transaction Groups) to be displayed on the Power Chart.
As time went on, we added several quality-of-life improvements to the Power Chart, including ways to resize most panels in 8.1.10, view the current zoom level in 8.1.11, and specify the amount of ticks on the y-axis (also in 8.1.11). Check out Inductive University’s lesson “Power Chart - Overview” to learn more about using it.
Designer Find/Replace Improvements
Numerous quality-of-life features were added to the Ignition Designer’s Find/Replace tool in 8.1.1, which provided greater speed and functionality when searching strings throughout your project and tags.
First, we added a ‘Select All’ checkbox in the Targets area, which enabled quickly selecting or de-selecting multiple target areas in your search.
We also provided Named Queries as a target option, so you could quickly search via keyword within Named Queries (like you could with all other project areas). Additionally, we added a multi-line text search using the wildcards ? or * so that replacing text wouldn’t mess up the formatting of lines of text or code.
Then, in 8.1.3 we also added support for resources defined by the WebDev Module.
Thanks to these improvements, Ignition’s Find/Replace tool became a lot more reliable to use in large, multifaceted projects. Brush up on how to use this tool with Inductive University’s lesson “Using Find And Replace.”
Perspective Map Improvements
In 8.1.7 we decided to show the Perspective Map some love with a couple updates that gave you more customization options.
First, we added a customControls component property to provide more flexibility and interactivity to projects using maps. This made it easier to add your own buttons and icons on top of the map component — without needing to use a coordinate container and struggle with its z-order. Thanks to this update, you could add a button to do things like jump to another location, for example.
We also added an onVectorClick event function for map component vector layers, to enable more custom onClick events on map components. With this you could specify a shape that could be used to highlight an area on the map. Then when a user clicks the vector, a scripting event would be triggered.
Overall, these improvements boosted the Perspective Map component’s ability to handle additional popup UI and real-time functionality.
Making Perspective Better And Better
In 8.1.10 we continued our quest to migrate more features that users enjoy in Vision over to Perspective.
First up we added Key Events, which provided similar functionality to Vision’s Keystroke Scripts, so you could add keyboard shortcuts to your projects. With Key Events, users can execute scripts in response to pressing a single key or a series of keys (for regex matches). The regex match functionality is especially helpful for scripting actions against scanned barcodes. We also added a Piping feature so that you could quickly draw pipes for better visualization of the flow between objects in HMI screens. This feature was heavily requested from users of Vision’s Pipe Segment feature.
We also added a tooltip meta property for all components, so users could benefit from custom notes that describe a component’s purpose in a Perspective client. And we added two new component-based scripting functions: requestTooltip and removeTooltip. These new functions were especially useful for touchscreens, since you can use them to create touchable buttons that expose tooltips.
Back To The Future
Learn about what’s new in 8.1.48 in the release notes and the Ignition user manual. And as always, we’re open to your suggestions via the ideas portal if there’s a new Ignition feature you think would improve the process of building SCADA systems.
If you’re excited about Ignition 8.3’s upcoming release, it’s a good idea to update to 8.1 now so you’re ready to hit the ground running with it. Not only will this enable you to take advantage of all the awesome features mentioned above, but with a support plan you’ll get to upgrade to 8.3 for free when it comes out (plus, don’t forget that 7.9 will reach EOL in June 2025).
In the meantime, keep an eye out for the Ignition 8.1.49 release train, which will arrive near the beginning of July.
