Ignition 8.1.37: Perspective Designer DevTools Update, Gateway Network Quality-of-Life Improvements

It may be freezing outside in Folsom (by California standards at least), but the release train is pulling into the station with an abundance of toasty new features.

Ignition 8.1.37 includes choice updates to the Perspective Designer DevTools, quality-of-life improvements to the gateway network, and more.

Perspective Designer DevTools

It just got a whole lot easier to debug Perspective views.

In 8.1.37, the Perspective Designer DevTools has an improved look and feel, along with increased reliability, which saves resources, enhances the design experience, and creates a more efficient workflow when you’re debugging a Perspective view from the designer.

Gone are the days of having to grab a URL, go to an external browser, and have separate individual third-party clients open at the same time when using the Chromium DevTools Debugger. We’ve eliminated the ability to copy a DevTools Debugger URL, and replaced that makeshift solution with a much more convenient UI where you can open the external debugger directly in Perspective.

Gateway Network

Folks who use the gateway network a lot will be especially pleased by a couple of handy new quality-of-life improvements in 8.1.37.

Individual Connection Stats

Individual connection stats are back on the Metrics Dashboard! They were previously dropped because they were difficult to use in some cases (and just not useful in others), but in 8.1.37 they’re back and better than ever.

With individual connection stats, you can easily access useful statistics for individual gateway network connections that are attached to a specific gateway or gateway server. To locate individual connection stats for existing active gateway connections, go to Add Metric > gateway-network > connections.

Send/Receive Thread Limits

8.1.37 also moves the configuration of send/receive thread limits from the gateway level down to the individual connection level. So rather than having all connections share the same limits, you can configure limits on a per-connection basis.

This is a valuable update, because not all gateway connections are created equal. Say you have one connection that’s particularly busy and needs a lot of threads, but the other connections are typically quiet. You’d need to create a lot of threads to accommodate the busy connection, and before 8.1.37 this would result in numerous unnecessary threads for the quiet connections.

But now, with the ability to configure the send and receive thread limits per connection, users can fine tune their resource allocation to better suit their needs. And as an added bonus — if a connection needs to be changed, instead of resetting all connections, you’ll only need to reset the one.

Honorable Mentions

Hang on, there are just a few more updates to shine a light on in 8.1.37.

Omron NJ Driver

At the request of a user, the Omron NJ Driver’s Date/Time Offset can now be configured in the range [-24, 24]. With the newly increased range, users in any time zone will be able to properly do date/time read/writing, even when daylight savings time is in effect.

Perspective

• Added the editingCell property to Perspective’s Table Component to let users specify the currently edited cell. This allows users to do additional programming related to entering/exiting cells, such as creating pop-up warnings to avoid accidental changes.

• Users now have a shorthand method to go all the way back to the top level in nested Perspective views. When a nested child component is selected, simply click on the gray area in the designer to directly select the top-level view.

Moving Right Along

Find out more about all these updates in the 8.1.37 release notes and the Ignition user manual. And as for the user manual, we’ll be giving it a bit of a makeover soon with some new tooling, but don’t worry — it’ll still be stocked with all the valuable content you need.

If there’s any feature you want to see in a future release, don’t be shy about letting us know! We love getting your feedback — it’s exceptionally valuable to us and helps to continually shape Ignition for the better. Speaking of which, do you hear that? It’s the Ignition 8.1.38 release train horn in the distance. It’s already chugging along and will deliver a shipment of exciting new features in March.