Pac Display Feature Request

I have a feature request for Pac Display. We have a pretty large display project that runs several test cells we have. So, in other words lots of different windows. Well, several of our cells have a few PID’s running on them.

I have PID buttons set up to view the PID’s, but whenever I switch windows they close. It would really be beneficial to view the PID windows over the course of time, lets say off to the side in a pop up window, but still be able to move around within our project and do other things.

I have messed around with the “All Others” settings, but no matter what, whenever the window that has the PID button on it is closed, the PID window closes. So, I guess to get around to the feature request it would be nice to A) be able to have some kind of window setting for the PID windows, and B) it would be nice to have “New Action” of “No change” so we could set one window to leave as it is and then be able to deal with the “All Others” settings. Currently I have to explicitly select all the windows to do an open/close operation. We have a lot of windows…

I know there is a little bit of a work around to my problem and that is to probably make a new window with supertrends and text inputs and then deal with those window settings. Or I suppose put the PID buttons on a seperate window that I can leave open. I guess the big thing is we have a lot of windows in our project so I like to ensure the ones we are not using get closed to prevent a ton of windows open in the background.

Hopefully all of my rambling makes sense.

Eric

I think I follow your train of thought… Sounds more like you want a setting ‘keep on top’?

Do you have a multi monitor setup? If so, you could just set up your PID window to be out off the side of the main project, this way you will still be able to interact with them while using the main windows on the main monitor.

I do have multiple monitors and that was my hope to pull that off to the side to watch the PID performance while we continue to run the cells. However, currently whenever the window that has the PID button on it is closed it closes the PID window regardless of where the PID window is located.

As for the “Keep on Top” setting, that could be good, but there might be a little more involved. There would probably have to be a window property level setting to that would allow you to flag which windows you wanted to keep on top. That way if the window you wanted to keep on top was open when you used a button to move to a different window, the keep on top window would remain open even if you used the All Others setting to close open windows.

I’m struggling to make this sound like it makes sense when it comes from my brain to type here on the forum, so hopefully you can get the basic of what I’m talking about. The other slight hiccup with this is there really isn’t any way to deal with PID popups as they truly are not a window. For my exact situation if there was a way to force the PID tuning window to stay open and on top until I actually closed it that would be good. However, I could see where this possibly could be of benefit if there was a way to make this also applicable to windows as well.

Eric

I think I don’t understand what you are calling a PID window… It should park to the left or right of the main project windows on a mulitmonitor and not be impacted. I just made one now and it hangs around just fine.

Do you mean the PID Tuning window in PAC Control?

No, I’m talking about the PID Viewer in PAC Display. So, if I put a PID button on a PAC Display window, lets call it window x, and use that button to open up the PID Viewer. Now, I want to move over to window y, I don’t need window x anymore. So, when I click on my button that is set up with the window control dynamic attribute to open up window y, as soon as window x is closed the PID viewer gets closed with window x.

Now you might ask, why did you close window x, just leave it open. Well, our display project has a lot of windows that we switch between. I normally try to keep the number of windows that we have open at any one time to a minimum. Also, we don’t need to have the PID Viewer up on a normal basis but it is nice to have that every now and then.

There are a few things I could possibly do different, like make one window that has all the PID Viewer buttons on that one window and I would always leave that window open, just in the background. This is where it would be nice to have an exception to the “All Others” part of the window control. Because right now, if I have it set to close all other except for the window I want to open, it would close the PID Viewer window which in turn closes the PID Viewer itself. So I would have to change the “All Others” setting to “no change” and explicitly select all of the other windows and make them close. When you have a lot of windows and a lot of buttons controlling the windows we switch between, that is going to be a very tedious process.

Hopefully this explains my situation better, and thanks for your thoughts on this.

Eric

So in doing a little digging this morning I figured out I have 9.6e and 9.6f has been out there for a while. Maybe this sort of thing has been changed between version 9.6e and 9.6f since yours worked differently than mine…

I will test when I have a chance and let you know.

Eric

Uh, sorry for the delay getting back to this thread…
I am using the latest version (9.6f).
As soon as you close the window that has the button to open the PID window on it, it closes the PID window as well.
At this stage we don’t have a work around, we tried a few of the usual and not so usual tricks and could not get it to work the way you want.
So for now, if you need the PID data, you will have to build a template window and just copy it each time you want a PID window.