Charting software

[phuz]

I recently started working on this charting software because the previous system was developed in vb6 and used client tools to dig into old HTR Data in IFIX. I wanted to make something that was more versatile, in that it could build charts not only from iHistorian, but also from Wonderware Historian, or from custom SQL data collection. All of this configurable from a GUI settings page. We are focusing on guidelines set from PDA/FDA for record management, but this is what I've come up with so far.

I'm open to suggestions on what kind of things should be included, or customizable, in a front-end like this. We have a few customers that are going to be using this within a matter of weeks, but the intention is to be able to implement this on many future applications.

 

[jkerekes]

What did you use to create this?

 

[phuz]

Hat did you use to create this?

This is all being done in Visual Studio with native connectivity to SQL and use of Proficy's iHistorian SDK library.

 

[cardosocea]

I have the same problem currently... are you using iHistorian or Historian classic? I'm not able to find anything regarding Classic Historian or even the .H04 file format to try and pull the data myself from the history files.

Any information you can share about this?

 

[phuz]

There are libraries you can use to look at classic historian or .H04 files, which is exactly what the previous software did that the customer previously had, but we migrated all the old data to iHistorian and are focusing efforts on the newer systems. If you look on the GE Community forums, you can download the older libraries. (https://digitalsupport.ge.com/)
I personally don't have any plans to integrate the older formats into this software.

 

[cardosocea]

Thanks. I am pushing to get a proper historian set up and aren't doing much with regards to this, but there's always the possibility of me not getting what I want and making do with what I got.

 

[phuz]

Thanks. I am pushing to get a proper historian set up and aren't doing much with regards to this, but there's always the possibility of me not getting what I want and making do with what I got.

If you go the path of iHistorian, I can probably point you in the right direction, depending on what you're looking to do. I've learned quite a bit while working on this.

 

[V0N_hydro]

you should check out kst. it is a very powerful plotting tool. https://kst-plot.kde.org/

Features I look for in a plotting tool:

* click and drag to zoom
* mousewheel scrolling back and forwards in time
* CTRL + mousewheel zooms in and out x axis (extends or decreases plotted period)
* shift + mousewheel zooms in and out y axis.
* ability to have a y-axis on each side of the chart with different scales shown, so I can plot time series with different units but show both scales. some plotting tools stack up the y-axis on the left of the plot, that is OK too, but what is not OK is having values that aren't per-unit with no scale shown. plot is then useless.