How difficult is it to create monthly reports from legacy InTouch historical data?

[defcon.klaxon]

Hi all,

I have a project where we'd like to use InTouch for the HMI for a water plant. The water plant needs to provide monthly reports to the State for water quality, which is basically a few tags worth of data every fifteen minutes (turbidity, chlorine residual, flow, and whether or not the plant is running/backwashing). The "easy" way to do this is to use Historian and Dream Reports, but the price tag on adding those is pretty steep. I'm wondering how hard it would be to create these monthly reports using legacy Historical trend data...I've found the Data Management Guidebook and I'm looking through it, but it seems deceptively simple. I know that while looking at older projects that did similar reporting it seemed like there was a lot of scripting needed to make it work. Basically wondering if you old school guys could tell me how difficult it would be to do this. Thanks!

 

[bjh]

It actually isn't horribly complicated!

Ocean Data Systems Dream Reports and HACH WIMS are 2 packages I've used in the past to make these reports (and even electronically submitted ones) easy and almost a no brainer to make - but they cost money.

Using the Histdata.exe program that Intouch provides is pretty straightforward. You can do the scripting within Intouch, or use DDE (Windows 7+ makes this slightly more difficult but not impossible) with Excel or your own application to spit out CSV files that make data manipulation easy.

 

[NetNathan]

Software Toolbox sells a nice program for getting information from the Intouch history files. WAY better than histdata. You do not even need Intouch to be running.
It reads directly from the *.lgh files.
https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/store/item_pages/itempage_1643.asp

 

[diat150]

intouch also had a program called hmireports that was pretty decent but much cheaper than the other **** they sell. not sure if it is still available or not.

 

[spaderkung]

Why not write the necessary data to .txt files? Intouch can do that periodically.

 

[brendan.buchan]

If you want to do it on the cheap I would recommend simply writing straight from InTouch to a CSV file to log values at whatever periodic intervals you need. You can set it to create a new CSV file at the start of every month.

You can then build a pretty report template in Excel and just import the CSV files monthly to populate the data.

 

[slim mole]

Hi all,

I have a project where we'd like to use InTouch for the HMI for a water plant. The water plant needs to provide monthly reports to the State for water quality, which is basically a few tags worth of data every fifteen minutes (turbidity, chlorine residual, flow, and whether or not the plant is running/backwashing). The "easy" way to do this is to use Historian and Dream Reports, but the price tag on adding those is pretty steep. I'm wondering how hard it would be to create these monthly reports using legacy Historical trend data...I've found the Data Management Guidebook and I'm looking through it, but it seems deceptively simple. I know that while looking at older projects that did similar reporting it seemed like there was a lot of scripting needed to make it work. Basically wondering if you old school guys could tell me how difficult it would be to do this. Thanks!

I recently completed a project to capture data from Gas Engines and produce daily, monthly and yearly reports. The data came from Wonderware and we used a product called RAPIDHistorian, which collected the live data, stored it in a DB and then generated PDF reports which were sent to users by e-mail. The data ws also available through Excel and a Web site dashboard. No coding required, all drag and drop. Worth a look.

Moley

 

[defcon.klaxon]

Hi all,

Sorry for not getting back to this sooner.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to take a look at all the programs that were suggested, and I was able to find an example of "old school/legacy" scripting that will create a .csv report of custom duration and frequency. I'll mess around and see what I can come up with. In the end the client decided to pony up the extra dough for Historian Express and Dream Reports which is great, but for other lean budget projects it would be good to know how to do it without having to spend ~$5,000!