Download the Solution Example here: LogicalAlarmArea.dbsln
Name: Logical Alarm Areas
Software Version: 10.0.6
Keywords: Alarms. Area. Alarm management.
Summary
The sample shows how to set up Logical Alarm Areas and how to use them to filter Alarms. It aims to demonstrate how your solutions can be enhanced with additional features in the alarming system to fit your needs. We will run through those features on this page. Going to Alarms/Areas, you'll find the Alarms Areas configuration interface.
Technical Information
In the Alarms Areas configuration interface, you can define logical areas to associate Alarms. You can also find child areas. In the Alarms/Items, you'll find a column called AuxValue for auxiliary value. In the Alarms Areas configuration interface, you can define logical areas to associate Alarms. You can also find the child areas and their sub-areas. In the Alarms/Items, you'll find a column called AuxValue for auxiliary value. This value adds to the Alarm Item definition, so another tag value, besides the tag value triggering the alarm item, can be displayed in the alarm message.
There are many attributes within the Alarm namespace designed for interacting with these new logical areas. For example, if you go to Alarm.Areas you'll see that you previously defined these areas in the solution. With each of these areas, several attributes allow you to interact with the alarm areas as you wish. Categories, descriptions, IDs, names, and total count are the total number of Alarms in that area, including child areas. An ack count is the total number of unacknowledged Alarms in that current area, including the child area. Total count local excludes the child areas. An account logo is without the child areas.
Plus, you'll see that there are ways to acknowledge all for the entire area or the entire area without the child area. Disable turns off the Alarms in the current and child areas. These properties also have a local version for counters and commands only for the selected area and do not include the child areas.
Switching to the running demo, we also provided a link to select an area when running the application. The AlarmAreas graphical component provides a tree view in runtime to show and select alarm areas. That is this object right here. You'll see that we have the areas and child areas as defined in the solution. As Alarms occur, you'll see them appear in the alarm viewer. The total count for area one alarm is two, unacknowledged two. If you acknowledge any of those, we still have two active Alarms, but only one needs to be acknowledged. As for area two, we can acknowledge areas one and 2. Let me reset these.
If you turn off an alarm area, you'll see no interaction for that alarm. It just doesn't work for that alarm area; it just doesn't show up anywhere. However, the system still processes the Alarms for the other areas as usual. Finally, you can select areas to show and access that information using the alarm area graphical object. It is a .NET object. So here, you are going to go ahead and create Alarms. These are, oops, these are still disabled. Let me go ahead and enable those, and you'll see here if you want to look at a specific sub-area, select that, get the filter, and now, in my viewer, you are only looking at sub-area one underscore two. You could look at sub-area one and underscore one by selecting that area or all the Alarms in area one. The same holds for area 2.
Reference Information
Check out the Alarm Areas documentation to leverage this feature's potential.