Studio 5000 View Designer - Simple Help

[RockyLeafs]

Hello,

We are beginning to use the View Designer software for the newer Panelview 5500 and 5300 HMIs.
I one we are starting with is the 5300 10".

I'm still getting use to the software and trying to navigate my way around it.
In FTStudio I used a lot of the feature available like global objects (looks like that appears to be Add-On Graphics in VD) and i'm just trying to do a couple of things that I would think would be simple but i'm having trouble finding.

Hoping someone with more familiarity with View Designer can help me.

First off, in FTStudio, you could switch the current state of an object using the 'States' toolbar. This gave you a quick way to show different states of the object so you could see how it would look depending on the state. Can't find something that does that in View Designer.

Secondly, there doesn't appear to be a way to change the colour (or color depending on you cournty/region) of certain predefined object like alarm status button or alarm managers.

Any tips on these and bonus tips I'd love to hear about.

 

[JasonWade]

I had a quick look into your two questions, and hit the same dead end sorry.

I've used a few of these HMIs now and wish they had;
1) Page numbers - there's no way to tell the PLC what page number you are on. I include a number in all my page names like 'p101_Operation' and extract it at the PLC.
2) PLC>HMI page change by number. To do this you need to create a Project Event for every page that you may want to invoke from the PLC. For example, the Project event 'PageChange_p101' ExecuteWhen is ':LC.HMI.stNav.diPageOpen==101'
3) Drop down selectors
4) Tab controls - there actually are some of these on the pre-defined pages, but they havn't been made available for us to use.
5) Background screens - or some other way to make a set of navigation keys once, and have them appear on every page. What a PIA to go through 50 pages every time the nav keys need editing!
6) Local user variables - for instance to remember what page was last displayed, and return to it later.
7) Scaling for data entry - it's possible to use an expression for data display, but not for data entry. I had two machines requiring Metric/Imperial settings and had to create two vars and two visible/invisible data entries for every setting, then have the PLC do the bi-directional conversions. What a PIA

That's all I can remember for now, good luck!