Ignition v7.9.5: Over 280 New Features & Fixes, Including User Requests

As Inductive Automation has grown, we’ve been able to build a team of developers who are dedicated to adding small features and fixing bugs in Ignition. That team has been very busy lately, putting over 280 features and fixes into Ignition v7.9.5!

One of the most exciting things about Ignition v7.9.5 is that we were able to add a number of suggestions from you, our user community. Through our feedback portal, users like you submit their suggestions and vote for the features that are the most important to them. Not only are we consistently amazed at the great suggestions you give us, but your feedback really helps us prioritize which features to add next.

Here are some of the new features in Ignition v7.9.5 that were suggested by the community:

  • Added digest authentication for IP cameras: Basic authentication is fine if you’re always able to have transport-layer security such as https, but that’s not always possible. With digest authentication, the credentials can be encrypted over an unencrypted connection, if the camera supports it.
  • Saving reports in Excel format: The new Reporting Module that we introduced with Ignition v7.8 made reporting easier and more powerful. Now in v7.9.5, we’ve made it even easier to share reports with others in your organization by adding Excel as one of the standard file types.
  • Reply-to for system.net.sendEmail(): Ignition makes it easy to send out emails to users, but sometimes you need to send an email from an address that isn’t the one you’d like replies to go to. Now you can specify the reply-to address, making those important emails even more useful.
  • Pasting components with broken bindings: When you’re designing your project, sometimes bindings are in an intentionally broken state that you’ll fix later in your workflow. Before, you couldn’t copy and paste a component with a broken binding. Now, Ignition warns you and removes the broken binding but still allows you to paste the component. This makes the project-development process much smoother.
  • Gateway Client Status page shows each client’s Java version: When you’re planning upgrades or working on making your system more secure, it’s useful to know if Java needs to be upgraded on some of the client machines. Now instead of having to contact each user or physically go to each machine, you can see the Java version of each logged-in client from a single place in the Gateway.
    Client JVM 1

    Client JVM 2
     
  • Priority filter for isAlarmActive expression function: It’s pretty common to only need to know if high-priority alarms are active, but it wasn’t easy to filter out that information in the expression language. Now, the Gateway can filter the results for you.
  • MAC address added to system client tags: It’s not unusual for the MAC address to be the only constant value for a client, so we’ve added a system client tag to make that easy to use in your projects.

    MAC Address
     
  • Template path can be copied via right-click: If your project uses a lot of templates with long paths, it’s not easy to select a template from the dropdown. Having the path available with just a couple of mouse-clicks makes using these templates easier and less prone to errors from typos.

If you’d like to read about the other features and fixes we’ve added in v7.9.5, take a look at the release notes or our online user manual. You can also download the new version and try it yourself. And by all means, please keep those great feature suggestions coming! We’re planning to release updates to Ignition v7.9 more frequently, and we look forward to turning more of your ideas into real Ignition features.


AUTHOR
Kathy Applebaum
Senior Engineer / Inductive Automation
Kathy Applebaum is a Senior Software Engineer at Inductive Automation. Kathy joined the company in 2013 and has previous experience in software engineering. She has a Master's Degree in Computer Science from California State University, Sacramento, where she now teaches night classes in computer science. In her spare time, she hikes with her husband and mastiff, bikes, and mentors a running group.