07 July 2009
Panorama E² v3.01 brings a number of new developments to the SCADA market, notably to vastly improve the development phase of an application. User Mode It is faster and more logical to build and maintain a SCADA application using a methodology based upon ready-to-run user objects that contain the complete functionality (I/O definitions, data properties, alarms, trends, animated graphics, etc ) of a real world item, e.g.: a “valve”, a “machine”, a “production line”, a “railway station platform”, a “room”, a “building”, etc…. A reduced operating mode called User Mode has been added to the Panorama E² Development Studio in response to demands to enable the developer to define a working environment inside the Panorama E² Development Studio. This mode is fully configurable by the developer such that only the user objects, their necessary properties and the chosen base Panorama E² functions are available to the project constructor. This is ideal for situations where a team has studied and developed a set of user objects that meet their application needs and where these user objects are issued to another team member, or another team, or a 3rd Party organization in order to complete the final application construction. This limits the access to the user objects whilst speeding up the development process and minimizing the possibility of errors. Reference Application Panorama E² v3.01 brings the concept of a reference application to the development and runtime environments; a reference application being a complete working application from which another application can refer directly to the user objects built inside it. This brings many possibilities to the Panorama E² application developer. It allows the development to be performed by several teams. The user objects can be developed independently and then delivered to the project development or maintenance teams, who simply incorporate them via a reference. Thus the project application becomes a container of multiple user objects with their real world references and specific project graphical layout. A modification delivered in the reference application would therefore be automatically incorporated into the project application by simply loading the new reference application and saving the project. This methodology can also be combined with the existing application encryption feature of Panorama E² Development Studio to ensure that any organization, such an OEM (original Equipment manufacturer) working hand-in-hand with a 3rd party integrator protects its IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) whilst the 3rd party integrator can directly access the provider’s user objects, which are managed separately. Application Comparison Tool Panorama v3.01 delivers an application comparison tool as standard. This tool allows the application developer to compare two applications and enables a rapid debug of application changes and also the change documentation for each application evolution. This tool indicates to the user by listing visually where an applications developer has deleted or created objects (both user objects and object instances), where object property values have been modified, where unit folders have created or deleted and where any lines of script code have been modified, added or deleted. The tool also uses color to display the branches of the application containing any changes. The data visualized within the tool can be printed out for documentation purposes. Application Deployment Tool The application deployment tool allows a user to easily deploy an application in an optimized and automatic manner, which is extremely useful for distributed architectures and becomes vital when managing multi-site applications. The tool optimizes the deployment process by deploying only files that have changed since the current installed evolution of the application and it does this automatically for each of the server and workstation machines declared inside the application, making light work for the installation team. New Standard Objects Panorama E² v3.01 delivers the following new objects as standard: A Web Navigator control based upon Microsoft Windows Explorer that can be used to directly display any URL such as: a PLC web diagnostic page, a web report from Report Server, etc…. ; or any standard documents such as: pdf, htm, images, video, flash film, etc.. A Date Time selection control based upon the Microsoft Date-Time Picker seen in Microsoft Outlook, which can be embedded into any Panorama E² graphical view, this gives a homogeneous date and time selection interface across applications. A Menu Tree Navigation object based upon a fully user definable and configurable menu tree structure with expandable and contractible branches. The configuration is via sub-objects containing a label, an image and a tooltip; and each entry can be masked to operator login level. Using this menu tree object, the operators will benefit from having an Explorer style structure to navigate the application.
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