FT View SE

Ok, I am trying to accomplish something I thought was very simple, and I have done in numerous other SCADA packages but is now stumping me in FT View SE distributed with 3 clients, dual monitor, so 6 instances of FT View SE client running.

Our applications typically have a top banner with various information on it including the current screen name (as a string value).

My first attempt to have the application populate the screen name was each screen had a start macro that wrote the screen name to a memory HMI tag (string type). It worked great until I started running multiple clients. When I changed the screen on one client, all the clients screen names would change. I guess this is because I am changing the value of the tag on the HMI server, and all the clients refer to that same tag.

I have came up with a solution to do this, but it involes 6 different top banners, 6 different start up macros (utilizing symbols), and 6 different HMI string tags. It seems like a lot of BS just to update a screen name on a top banner (thinking about moving the screen names to the actual screens). I think I could do this all with 1 top banner if I could figure out a way of storing the string value to only the local instance of the client (not on the server).

So I guess my question is does anybody know of a way to store string value local to a client instance so that the 5 other client instances cannot see it?

Failing that, does anybody else have a genius way of accomplishing what I am trying to accomplish?

The only way I can think of doing that in FTView SE is to ( as with anything else on that broken platform ) use VBA.

For the banner screen, you need to define a string variable, which will be local to the particular client... The FTView server doesn't know anything about what VBA is running on a client, so all client variables are essentially private to the running client. Put a text field on that display, which is a VBA control. Now, every time you open a window up, the VBA in the new window has to get it's title, create a list of opened displays, verify that the titlebar display is actually present, and then write it's name to the "name" variable you created in the titlebar VBA.

Oh, of course, the titlebar VBA must also have timer code running so that it can update the text field regularly, as FTView doesn't do that explicitly.

Aside from VBA, there are no other 'client local' tags, which would be a worthwhile feature, but the entire piece of software is so broken and inefficient and just plain OLD that the best worthwhile feature is to stay away from FTView.