Dashboard Visualization

An introduction to GraphWorX64, the primary graphical design environment in the ICONICS Suite. This covers how to build displays in the environment, and key aspects of the environment that are best to know early on in the process to save you time later.

Symbols can be just about anything in a display, including user interaction points such as buttons, knobs, or sliders as well as gauges and visual representations of equipment. Learn how to build and work with these symbols at scale.

Commanding is the primary means of developing the visualization environment to be interactive and allow users to take action. These commands can be used to write values to data sources, trigger reports or transactions, or to directly control the user environment.

When building out the user interface for access into a SCADA application it is important to think about the means of navigation available to the user. This section covers the out-of-the-box tools available to create professional dashboards and user interfaces, as well as how to save development time on the design and reuse of displays.

Aliasing is an indispensable tool for scaling up projects, allowing you to genericize graphics and dashboards such that in real time you can connect them to any data you wish. It also saves on configuration time, allowing for easier changes and updates later.

The Asset configuration is not just a server-side function, it also has a runtime viewer component that allows you to work with your assets as a client as well. This covers the addition of an asset tree into a traditional SCADA dashboard.

The alarm viewer will be the predominant means of interacting with alarms in a dashboard. It allows for full filtering and grouping, as well as user acknowledgement and commenting as necessary.

Grid viewers are a versatile control, and are useful for varied charting of asset-based datasets as well as for direct grid viewing and manipulation of data. They are most commonly used with database data but also have numerous applications with other datasets.

The trend viewer is a key tool for displaying data to a user, particularly for historical and logged data. This control may be used to plot data in real-time on the dashboard, and comes with it a variety of tools accessible to the user in runtime to get extract the most information out of the data.

Recipes are a great way of maintaining standard sets of configurations that may be applied and written to equipment via any of the standard protocols. In the context of visualization, there are two specialized controls that will make it easy for users to manage and deploy their library of configuration recipes.

It is often useful to have runtime access to the schedules that control your processes, either to review upcoming events or to make adjustments to account for real-world situations. This covers how to embed controls that interface to the ScheduleWorX services.

The fault viewer is a specialized control to be used with viewing real time and historical faults as generated by the FDD engine. The pre-configured control allows for easy filtering of the fault lists as applicable to the subsystem you may focus on at any given time.

IP cameras, such as those which may be used in manufacturing processes or in security and access control applications, can be directly embedded into graphics to allow real-time monitoring.

There are a collection of tools and controls available within the GraphWorX design environment, each with specialized features for their respective application. These are collectively referred to here as "helper controls".

Advanced controls are typically those which interact with multi-dimensional datasets or applications with their own bespoke interface. There are a variety of ways the visualization platform can be extended to incorporate them.

Dashboards and user interfaces can be enhanced through the use of live, full feature 3D graphical representations. These 3D models can be developed natively, or imported from standard CAD models and BIM models. Integration of 3D environments into a SCADA application can prove especially useful in intricate or hard-to-access applications.

Many of the applications designed with the ICONICS Suite will be handling sensitive data on a regular basis, so it is important to have a competent security model built around the client access to that data. The Security Server will be responsible for housing the user and group configurations, but there are many other aspects to competently securing a dashboard.

Cloning is a powerful tool in graphical development. It facilitates rapid development as well as adaptive and future-proof designs. Cloning frequently leverages other powerful ICONICS features such as asset-based design and business intelligence data organization.