timer documentation

[franji1]

And don't forget to at least look at wrapping.  Long, deeply hierarchical tag names need it, because now the symbol is its own description, and I really really really hate not seeing the whole rung all on screen at once, except obviously for extremely complex ones.  Especially when it seems like there's no reason for it.

Temporarily zooming out and in using Ctrl+Mouse Wheel is great for graphics that are too big to fit on the screen.  11 zoom levels makes this quite useful.

[Controls Guy]

Temporarily zooming out and in using Ctrl+Mouse Wheel is great for graphics that are too big to fit on the screen.  11 zoom levels makes this quite useful.

"Great", no.  Marginally acceptable till it gets fixed, yes.  "Great" would be finishing it (though I'm still waiting on Rockwell for this self-evident change after 16 years so I ain't holding my breath for them at least).

Take AutoCAD as an analogy.  In the early days, screen size and resolution were such that your view was either broad or deep.  You could zoom out to see an entire schematic page, but you couldn't read the text.  If you were tight enough to read the text, you could only see about a third of the page, so sometimes your context was limited; you were zooming in and out all the time (which with the PCs of the day was a time-killer in and of itself).  There will admittedly always be a tradeoff between depth and breadth, but to get useful information bandwidth, you have to be able to get a minimum level of both depth and breadth simultaneously.  Display size and resolution eventually reached the point where AutoCAD had a tipping point for this issue, where you could get adequate breadth and depth simultaneously so that working digitally carried no penalty to have to balance with the obvious advantages.  Now, we're WAY past that tipping point.  My current screen is about the size of a paper drawing with resolution approaching that of paper, so I can see an entire drawing at once and still read the text just fine.

The same principle is applicable in PLC commissioning, but even more so.  You're not viewing a static drawing, but a rung or three where you need to see all the status in real time, preferably while still being able to see what each token represents.  As a practical number, I'd say you need to be able to show 8 or ten contact across with maximum length tag names in a readable font.  THAT'S why tag name wrapping is a must-have.

[BobO]

We have no plans to wrap nicknames, so I guess you'll be stuck with descriptions after all. Good thing you like those letter/number thingies.

[Controls Guy]

No, even with nicknames at 32 characters max, I think you can probably get an adequate number across the screen without wrapping; I'm talking about tag names, particularly once you implement structs.  Then I think you're going to HAVE to look at wrapping to keep DMD as functional as possible.

Assume that in a process plant, I create a TempCtrl struct, which might include a BOOL member named HeaterEnabled.  Now I create a struct to represent a process tank, one member of which is a TempCtrl struct that we'll call "Temp".  Now I might instantiate those tank structs one at a time by name, but lets say there are several similar (plus I might want to iterate through them), so instead I create an array, say "MixTank"[0..19].

So then a typical tag would be "MixTank[13].Temp.HeaterEnabled" -- I could easily see those type tags exceeding a length that would let you display rungs with a good combination of breadth and depth, and if you keep your tag names short and non-hierarchical, then you're letting the power of the concept go to waste (for a lot of applications).  RS5000 has never done anything to address this and it DOES seriously impact productivity.

[BobO]

It will be a while before we nest structs, but yes, I can see how that would get painful pretty quickly.

[Controls Guy]

It will be a while before we nest structs, but yes, I can see how that would get painful pretty quickly.

I know, but I trust we'll get there eventually!   

RS5000 doesn't even wrap on the paper printouts, and it makes those a lot less usable for the same reason.  Even if they just defaulted to wrapping on every dot, that would put each level of hierarchy on its own line, which would be very intuitive and easy to read.  You could explicitly override the default wrapping if for whatever reason you needed to.