An important issue to think about is the control of the system and its equipment. From the planning we've completed thus far, we know that we will be controlling the status and mode of the booster pump, as well as the feed time for the dry chemical feeder.
Buttons, sliders and numeric entry fields are just some of the tools available to provide operator control of the system. As you work through the tutorial, you will see these and more.
It is also important to help avoid operator error that could occur if a button were inadvertently clicked. One means of dealing with operator error is to place controls on a separate page so that operators are conscious of opening a separate page to access controls. Therefore, we will place the controls for the booster pump on a separate page that we will configure as a pop-up dialog. In order to access the buttons, the operator will have to first open the control panel. This process will meet two important requirements: It will help us to prevent cluttering the booster station overview page with unnecessary details (thereby reducing page area used), and will make operators more conscious of accessing the controls for the pump.
Control panels can also provide another benefit: VTS enables security to be configured for pages as well as for output tags. By placing controls on a separate control panel, you will double your security options. You could configure the outputs in such a way that users require a special privilege to control equipment, and configure the page with a separate privilege. Only those users who actually have the responsibility of controlling equipment will be able to do so.