Do-More Designer with BRX bugs

[Bolt]

Sorry, this might not be the cleanest way to report/document my issues, but here it goes anyways...

1.  Some of my Stages disappear after working with the program for a while.  I'll have the program open, connected, using status monitor, make an edit, write to PLC, works fine, then later make another edit, accept, and then write it to PLC and the attached errors appear.  Most of the content in one program, (always same one), disappears.  I first had this issue about 3 weeks ago.  If I cancelled the write to PLC it would continue to function fine.  Disconnecting and closing the program "fixed" everything.

At first I thought it was an issue with my program being "messy".  I have since cleaned it up and made it completely stage based, got rid of all the sloppy interlock bits, etc.

I haven't had the issue in a while, then today, on a fairly fresh restart and connect to PLC (~2 hrs), I noticed it again, before even trying to write anything to PLC.

[Bolt]

2.  When updating my programs (runtime edits) a few times in short succession, the later write to PLC's take ALLOT longer than the first one.  I have attached some screenshots of a trend view to show the time gaps.  These are loaded from an archive, so the yellow and blue vertical lines are not there anymore. >TANGENT> is there a list of what all the different colored vertical lines mean?

Today's occurrence was very extreme, the worst I have ever experienced.  I made a simple modification to the program, 2 NO contacts in an OR configuration to an existing rung, and wrote to PLC.  The first little spot of missing trend view data.  After updating I realized one of the contacts needed to be an NC contact, so I changed it and (attempted) to write to PLC again. After over 30 minutes of the write not going through, I put my critical loads in manual on mode, and put the PLC in stop mode.  It still did not go through.  Then a little later I powered to PLC down for ~30 seconds.  Then cycled through stop, run, term switch settings and it seemed to go through.  I saved my trend views, and rebooted the computer, and everything seems to be "fine" now.  Have done a few writes, seems to work speedy again.

[Bolt]

3.  Here's one I've suspected a few times, most recently while making my previous reply...  When doing a write to PLC, and having Firefox open on my second monitor, it starts highlighting text when moving the mouse around.  I have not done much testing to figure this out.   DMD 2.1.4, Firefox 57.0.1, Windows 7 SP1.

[Bolt]

Okay, one more and I'm done.

4.  Sometimes when accepting rungs, the program freezes for longer than I can tolerate, maybe a minute, and I have to close it via task manager.  Again, haven't done much figuring out here.

[BobO]

I'm sure Franji1 will have some thoughts. The big thing with any bug like this is duplication. If we can dupe it, we can fix it. Unfortunately it isn't always easy to dupe.

#1 is ugly...never seen anything like that.

I'm feeling like #2 and #4 are processor/memory load related, possible due to comm/status/drawing. There are some tuning things we can try to reduce comm load that might be helpful.

#3 could also be related to load, but I have seen Ctrl or Shift key states get stuck before that cause issues like this. Usually tapping the key will clear it. I don't know if it is us or some Windows drawing layer anomaly.

[franji1]

We would like to look at your project.  If you can, please .ZIP it up and email it to support@hosteng.com and we will take a look at it.

[franji1]

What version of Designer are you using?  It should be in the title bar.

[Bolt]

Email sent.  Let me know what else you need from me or what you find out.