Ignition Features and Ideas

Like Visual Studio

I recently got an error message and it turns out the reason for it was because I hadn't set my Ignition Designer to 'Read/Write' mode, so all read queries would work fine but I couldn't write data to the database. This was difficult to diagnose because of verbose error messages that in no way highlighted the main cause of the issue. The real reason 'Caused by: com.inductiveautomation.ignition.client.gateway_interface.GatewayException: Cannot run this function when in read-only mode.' about 2/3rds of the way down at the 2nd line that starts with 'Caused By:', very hard to find. If the error message stack trace in the script console were collapsed and expandable at the users request, with only the core error message info shown, it would be much easier to debug. See the attached PDF which shows the difference between the 2 error messages, which is pretty stark.

99% of the time when I open a named query, I want to see the SQL it's running or the variables passed into it. While the Settings page is useful, it's consistently frustrating that opening a named query opens the Settings page, and then you have to click over to the Authoring page. For people who deal with database heavy projects, this is a common occurrence! This seems like a potentially easy change that could reduce a minor annoyance to zero. Thanks!

On the native view, we need a way to alter the 'Alarm Name' property, or have an additional field where we can enter custom information to show. The current Alarm Name is 'Alarm Name' + 'Tag Path' and the view has no configuration available. It would be nice to see the current value or other alarm properties on this view. NOTE: This is the view opened from an email ack link.

It would be very nice if you could select a named query in a script. Just like you select a property. When you selected and fill in some information the script with all the parameters will write for you. The params will be copied from the named query and will use the same name for the variable in the script.

On the page linked below, the theme colors are listed, but I can't find any information anywhere (on or outside of inductive websites) that explain what "--seq-1" might mean / when to apply it or "--div-1", etc. Some of the items are somewhat clear, like "Call To Action" but I'm not sure why that's a completely different color from an Alarm active? (I would think a similar color would be used to get my attention to things that require an action?) A blue color similar to "information" doesn't exactly grab my attention? Perhaps these are common 'web-developer-isms', but in my experience, many Systems Integrators / SCADA developers don't come from that background. It could help to add some sort of verbiage indicating when might be the right time to use each. Thanks! https://docs.inductiveautomation.com/docs/8.1/ignition-modules/perspective/styles/perspective-built-in-themes#built-in-theme-colors

Add an "else if" option to expression bindings. Currently the only way to have multiple "If" statements in an expression is to have nested If statements.

Often we start making changes to t a screen and realize that we should have duplicated the screen first in case we decide to discard the changes. It would be useful to be able to save a screen under a different name after changes ar made. Sometimes these changes span ork sessions and I want to preserve them without overwriting the existing screen.

Can we have the ability to turn on whitespace indicators for all scripting windows? I am encountering a lot of mixed tabs and spaces in our scripts. This is causing some very undesirable behavior in terms of Python execution. Recently on a Tag script, I had some spaces in front of a tab that I didn't even notice, despite explicitly checking for it (my fault for missing it). As a result, some code was executing outside of a conditional. From what I'm seeing, you will usually get a warning if your entire line has indenting that does not match the other lines in the script. In my case, I had a mixture of tabs and spaces on a line and received no error about it. I think the best solution would be to have a way to turn on whitespace indicators like in VSCode. Currently I'm either copy and pasting our code back and forth or I'm clicking all over the script like a madman trying to figure out what the line is using. Thanks!

Add a checkbox to run a script in the Script Console as though it were running on the Gateway. OR Check a box and the Script console would highlight lines that might not work if run as a Gateway event script. I've figured out my issues this time, but it's hardly the first time that I've been all excited that my script runs great in the console only to have it fail miserably while I paste it into a Gateway event script.