First Up Alarm

[Gammatech]

I have 9 possible alarms that are each valued 0 if the alarm is not set and 1 if it is.

I would like them to display in a list such that the first one to alarm will be at the top of the list and the second below this and so on. As and when a particular alarm condition clears then the lower entries in the list will move up to fill the empty space of the cleared alarm. There is a text caption (currently an array of strings) with each element of the array holding the particular alarm caption and I would also like to display the time that the alarm became set to 1.

I have experimented with the alarms of DaqFactory but cannot get these to do what I want. I have no need to acknowledge an alarm nor can it be reset by the operator as it is purely a value sent from the remote equipment (via a serial input every second)

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

[AzeoTech]

well, you probably don't want the built in alarm feature. You just need an array of strings containing the alarms. The time will be associated when you set it. To add a newly fired alarm, just do:

alarmlist.append("my alarm")

to remove one and have everything shift do:

for (private i = 0, i < numrows(alarmlist), i++)
   if (alarmlist[i] == alarmtodelete)
	  alarmlist.removeat(i)
	  break
   endif
endfor

[Gammatech]

Thanks for that.

I found as my data is coming in every second that alarmlist kept on growing whilst the alarm was active so I changed the alarmlist.append to be a sequence similar to the delete alarm code loop:

Private Found = 0
For(Private Index = 0, Index < NumRows(AlarmList), Index++)
	If(AlarmList[Index] == ThisAlarm)
	   // Alarm already in list so just update the time
	   AlarmList.Time[Index] = SysTime()
	   Found = 1
	EndIf
EndFor
If(Found == 0)
   // Alarm not yet in list so append it
   AlarmList.Append(ThisAlarm)
EndIf

This seems to work ok.

I tried the sequence as a Function passing the string ThisAlarm {AddAlarm(ThisAlarm)}but it appended NaN to the list so presumably one can only pass numbers to a Function Sequence? I'm now using a Global string ThisAlarm and that works ok with BeginSeq(AddAlarm)

My list as displayed on the screen is a vertical column of 9 variable value components having AlarmList[0] in the top one through to AlarmList[8] in the bottom one. That works ok as when AlarmList is empty nothing is displayed and as the list fills, the individual elements display. I have added an extra vertical column of Variable value components (beside the first column) with:

FormatDateTime("%a %d %b %H:%M:%S", AlarmList.Time[n]) in each of them and this shows the time that the alarm was set or updated but when the list is empty the variable shows as a zero crossed out. Is there a way to blank this empty list condition? I assume I could replace the failing formatted empty timestamp with a single space using some boolean arithmatic but I'm not sure how.

Looking forward to the release of Version 6!

[AzeoTech]

Yes, I was only explaining how to add to the end. You could replace your loop with the search() function. It would run much faster and be a bit cleaner to read.

Why not use a table control instead of a bunch of variable value components?

As for making it disappear, us the iif() statement:

iif(alarmlist.time[n] == 0, "", formatdatetime(...))

Finally, yes you can pass strings into functions, you just have to declare it as a string in the function prototype:

function foo(string myparam)

instead of a number:

function foo(myparam)

DAQFactory only has two data types, but you have to tell it which one you want! Otherwise you end up with problems like in javascript where 1+1 sometimes equals 11 not 2.