FactoryTalk Alarms and Events server Animation Help

Hey all,

I'm working in Factorytalk SE and trying to get used to the Alarms and Events Server. It has a lot of good capabilites but being an entire separate server is getting in our way.

Currently we just want to pull the priority setup out of the server so we can animate the screen appropriately. I know there are functions for getting the highest priority active an all but I have trends that show High and High High ranges or text. I want my high range to animate it's own color depending on the priority separate from the high high. Is there anyway to access this information other than doing a sql query in vba?

Even changing to make my alarms as tags doesn't give you access to each's priority.

Please help. This project is supposed to ship in a couple weeks.

Could you read those values from the controller?

I thought there were tags in the structure for HHLimit and HLimit.

Our scope is just the HMI. The PLC standards vary so we are using the HMI to do everything so we can conform.
The HHLimit and HLimit are the setpoints for alarming, not the priority. Not all HH alarms are created equal here.

The method we have now is to make a tag for each priority ( HH, H, L, LL) and tie it in in the server. This adds 4 more HMI tags for each transmitter but it's better than nothing. I'm not sure the real risks of overpopulating the HMI tag server, if any.

If you only use 200 alarm tags, it probably won't make a big difference. 2,000 tags and you probably will see that.
Be careful of tag update rates.

If you are worried about adding 4 HMI tags per transmitter, measure before and after of the running system performance:
- Tag server PC CPU % and RAM usage
- Network packets & bytes / second
- ControlLogix CPU % and measure the continuous task scan time

You could also data log (at the HMI) a millisecond timer (from the PLC) at the fastest possible rate. Compare the actual values logged before and after all of your changes.
That gives you a practical measure of the changes to your running HMI system.