[RANT ON]
After having worked with it for a week, this is by far the sorriest, buggiest, piece of craptastic software that RS has released. While most of the problems are not earth shattering (read BSOD type), cumulatively, they make for a difficult development environment. I'm only crossing my fingers at this point, that once developed, at least the Client application will be dependable.
[/RANT ON]
Okay, having gotten that off my chest, maybe it is just me. I mean, I'm trying to do simple stuff (no imbedded VBA), and every time I hit roadblocks....Here's just a few (if anyone has solutions and points to me being an idiot, I'll gladly retract my opinion!)
- Tag browser doesn't refresh properly. If I add new folders into the Tag Editor and populate it with tags, it is hit or miss whether the Tag browser will see them in some reasonable time. Even after manually refreshing ALL FOLDERs they still don't show up. Yet I can manually cut/paste them into animations and they work fine. [EDIT: Known Problem. If you duplicate a folder, it won't show up, unless you add a new tag to the parent folder, hit refresh, and THEN it will show up. What a crock]
- Multiple Selection of Objects Bug. For whatever reason, if I drag across multiple items to select, sometimes I get the 'dots' and sometimes they appear opposite. In otherwords, an unselected object will have the 'dots' and a selected object won't.
- Multiple Selection of Objects within a group. So, can anyone tell me how to drag and select multiple objects while editing within a group?
- Refresh of Client screens. Seems to be hit or miss here. If I make a change on the development side to a display grafix, that change doesn't show up on the Client, even if I reload the screen. I've tried it with Caching turned off and on with no difference. Shutting down/restarting the Client consistently does it, however.
- WTF? When using RSLinx Enterprise, why in the world would you hide the poll time on the display settings of the window where you have the tag sitting.
- Numeric and String Input objects...Please, why isn't there a means to turn off the stupid outline (hashed or solid) of the input object. Makes the image look junky, IMO. No VBA method, no property, no nothing to turn this off and confirmed by RS tech support.
- Numeric and String Input objects, part deux...Okay, why is the color settings of an input object hidden and only defineable in the display settings? Meaning, ya can't have 'em different colors on a single screen. And it took me an hour to find the setting.
- Installation...If you have Net Framework 2.1 installed, FT won't even install, cause it is looking for 2.0. Not smart enough to know that 2.1 is as good. The solution is registry hacks or uninstall 2.1, install 2.0, install FT, install 2.1. Silly.
- Maximize the graphic editing area in Studio. For some reason, the windows lose their outline. Junky looking.
- VBA Runtime crashing. I'm not even using VBA and yet the diagnostic window indicates that the VBA engine crashes each time the client starts.
- Setting Default Login. According to tech support, the only way is to do it in the startup macro, where you have to type out the password. Should be able to just select a pre-configured user to do this.
- On screen keyboard. There are no less than 3 places where you can define their use for an application. Haven't really figured out which one takes precidence.
- Slow. Lots of things are slow. As an example, when configuring a tag and check boxing the Alarm indicator, it takes 10 to 20 seconds before the alarm button becomes enabled to actually configure the alarm message format.
These are just but a few of the nagging issues I keep dealing with. Again, nothing that can't be worked around, but for the 'next evolution' of HMI development, I would have thought it would be leaps and bounds beyond RSView32.
- One praise...Glad they finally put a retentive option on the tags.
After having worked with it for a week, this is by far the sorriest, buggiest, piece of craptastic software that RS has released. While most of the problems are not earth shattering (read BSOD type), cumulatively, they make for a difficult development environment. I'm only crossing my fingers at this point, that once developed, at least the Client application will be dependable.
[/RANT ON]
Okay, having gotten that off my chest, maybe it is just me. I mean, I'm trying to do simple stuff (no imbedded VBA), and every time I hit roadblocks....Here's just a few (if anyone has solutions and points to me being an idiot, I'll gladly retract my opinion!)
- Tag browser doesn't refresh properly. If I add new folders into the Tag Editor and populate it with tags, it is hit or miss whether the Tag browser will see them in some reasonable time. Even after manually refreshing ALL FOLDERs they still don't show up. Yet I can manually cut/paste them into animations and they work fine. [EDIT: Known Problem. If you duplicate a folder, it won't show up, unless you add a new tag to the parent folder, hit refresh, and THEN it will show up. What a crock]
- Multiple Selection of Objects Bug. For whatever reason, if I drag across multiple items to select, sometimes I get the 'dots' and sometimes they appear opposite. In otherwords, an unselected object will have the 'dots' and a selected object won't.
- Multiple Selection of Objects within a group. So, can anyone tell me how to drag and select multiple objects while editing within a group?
- Refresh of Client screens. Seems to be hit or miss here. If I make a change on the development side to a display grafix, that change doesn't show up on the Client, even if I reload the screen. I've tried it with Caching turned off and on with no difference. Shutting down/restarting the Client consistently does it, however.
- WTF? When using RSLinx Enterprise, why in the world would you hide the poll time on the display settings of the window where you have the tag sitting.
- Numeric and String Input objects...Please, why isn't there a means to turn off the stupid outline (hashed or solid) of the input object. Makes the image look junky, IMO. No VBA method, no property, no nothing to turn this off and confirmed by RS tech support.
- Numeric and String Input objects, part deux...Okay, why is the color settings of an input object hidden and only defineable in the display settings? Meaning, ya can't have 'em different colors on a single screen. And it took me an hour to find the setting.
- Installation...If you have Net Framework 2.1 installed, FT won't even install, cause it is looking for 2.0. Not smart enough to know that 2.1 is as good. The solution is registry hacks or uninstall 2.1, install 2.0, install FT, install 2.1. Silly.
- Maximize the graphic editing area in Studio. For some reason, the windows lose their outline. Junky looking.
- VBA Runtime crashing. I'm not even using VBA and yet the diagnostic window indicates that the VBA engine crashes each time the client starts.
- Setting Default Login. According to tech support, the only way is to do it in the startup macro, where you have to type out the password. Should be able to just select a pre-configured user to do this.
- On screen keyboard. There are no less than 3 places where you can define their use for an application. Haven't really figured out which one takes precidence.
- Slow. Lots of things are slow. As an example, when configuring a tag and check boxing the Alarm indicator, it takes 10 to 20 seconds before the alarm button becomes enabled to actually configure the alarm message format.
These are just but a few of the nagging issues I keep dealing with. Again, nothing that can't be worked around, but for the 'next evolution' of HMI development, I would have thought it would be leaps and bounds beyond RSView32.
- One praise...Glad they finally put a retentive option on the tags.
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