PAC Display Auto Log Out

I would like to close some displays when an auto log out occurs. Any suggestions? I am using PAC Display Configurator 9.0f.

Hi Dan,

Welcome to the forum…
I’m not quite following what you are asking… You want to close some windows in Runtime when a user logs out of the PC?

Ben.

Thanks for the welcome Ben.

In PAC Display Configurator, if I go to the Configure menu option, then choose Runtime… and the Security tab, then click the Allowed Users… button under the Login Options frame I get the opportunity to add some users to my system. If I add a runtime user one of the options is inactivity timeout. This all works great.

There are certain displays I only want supervisors to have access to, so I add in the layer of security that is tied into the OS. The user clicks on a button, if they are correctly configured in the Global Operator Driven Access they can open these ‘supervisor level’ displays. Again, that all works great.

Now, if the user gets logged out of the system after an inactivity delay that was setup in the paragraph mentioned above, those supervisor displays are still open. Next person who logs on can access them. Is there any way to close those displays when the inactivity timeout occurs?

Dan,

Shortest answer; No.
Short answer; Windows does not provide for it.

Long answer; According to the programmer, because we are using the Windows OS system calls to handle the authentication there are no ‘hooks’ that we can tap into for when that user logs out of some/any of the pages [I]within[/I] the application (either user driven or via the inactivity timeout). Windows expects the user to log out of the PC, not just an application or a sub-section of the application.
So, with that limitation, the only thing I can think of is to tie the window state to the strategy. This way you can control the window state yourself rather than the Windows OS.
As an example, you could start a timer when a window opens and close it when the timer expires.
Another thought, its a little more work, but you could have a table of users/passwords/windows in your strategy and manage supervisor access to those windows via the strategy.
The way we did it at the hospital I worked at before I came to Opto was to allow all operators to see all the screens/data, but then security locked critical settings, such as PID set-point and tuning parameters.

Any other forum lurkers got any ideas on how to manage this scenario?
Dont be shy, type up!

In the past I have used a chart & variables in PAC Control to manage user activity. Set some variables in the PAC Display project to control an auto logout. I got around the problems with loaded displays by having a large shape on each page that is only visible when no user is logged in. This is a pretty unpleasant way to do it, but it was the best way I could think of to accomplish what I wanted.

Thanks for the thoughts, Ben.