11.9 On Your Own

To add a finishing touch to the page, use your knowledge of the application development tools of the Configuration Toolbox to add a rectangle to the left end of the water main on the Chlorination Unit application page. Label this object "Booster Station" and configure it with a page change hotbox that will open the Booster Station application page and display the overall system.

Should you require assistance with this section, please refer to Solution for 11.9 On Your Own Section.

 

 

 

The Chlorination Unit application page should now appear similar to Figure 156.

Figure 156

The list below provides you with a summary of the information you learned in Lesson 11.

Skills Achieved in Lesson 11

By completing Lesson 11, you learned the following:

•      When complex arrangements of high detail static images are required, background bitmaps can be installed using the Page Manager's Page Properties dialog. Examples of complex images might be plant floor layouts, detailed equipment images, geographical maps, scanned images, construction drawings, etc.

•      You can add your own custom-drawn equipment images and backgrounds by drawing them in a graphics program and saving them in bitmap format (*.bmp), Windows meta file format (*.wmf), or enhanced meta file format (*.emf)

•      In order for VTS's Select Bitmap dialog to recognize your custom images, they must be stored appropriately within the application's directory. Inside the application's directory is a Bitmap directory. Inside the Bitmap directory you can create directories according to the equipment group you wish your custom images to be part of. In this lesson we added a custom background bitmap to the Backgrounds directory. (Detailed instructions on adding custom bitmaps can be found in the VTS Developer's Guide);

•      VTS features a special color known as "Active Orange" that can be created using the RGB values R=255, G=160, and B=0. Any areas of a background bitmap (or an equipment bitmap) that are drawn using the "Active Orange" color will be affected by the Image Change drawing method used for digital input tags, digital output tags, alarm tags, function tags, and modem tags.

•      Tag drawing methods are versatile and can be used in many different ways, according to the way you configure their properties.

•      Analog output tags have two drawing methods used to transmit values to equipment, and several to show the current value of the tag.

You have now completed all of the steps necessary to create the basic input/output tags and draw the operator interfaces for the Booster Station tutorial application.

 

If you refer to the system plan, the Tag Table (see Create a Tag Table), and the requirements laid out by the client, you will see that there is still some work left to do. You must create alarms for the system, set up logger tags to record tag data for the client, and apply security to the application. The following lessons will show you how to complete these tasks.