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OMRON
CHAPTER 17
Best Practices
This chapter details the best practices to get the most from CX-Supervisor including how to plan and
design your application.
Design
This section covers some good design practices. There is no doubt, as with everything in life that a
good design is essential and creating a good CX-Supervisor application is no different. Poorly
designed applications may run slower, provide slower user feedback, be difficult to maintain –
increasing costs and in some cases not fulfil all User Requirements resulting in the application being
rewritten. Never fall into the trap "code first, think later".
•
Design your page layouts and navigation flow.
Traditional design works well for most applications. Providing an application with a clear structure
can make applications very easy to navigate even if they have many pages.
•
Create a Main overview / navigation page. This can include basic information like
company logo and date/time. If the application will be using security levels provide
buttons to login.
•
Add links from the main page to detailed system areas with either buttons or schematic
diagram e.g. Process 1, Process 2.
•
Add links from the main page, if required, to pages dedicated to Alarms, Diagnostics,
Reports, Data Logging, Statistics etc
•
If the system has repeated functions e.g. 5 similar machines, instead of creating 5 pages
think about creating 1 page that can show data for any machine. This can be achieved
using indirection and/or keeping data in arrays, and just setting the index to display the
machine you require. Minor differences (e.g. a button for Process 1 only) can be shown
or hidden depending on the index. This will speed up development and also help when
the application is maintained.
Organise the pages sensibly on screen. Make sure that only the pages that are necessary are open.
When a page is no longer needed close it. CX-Supervisor will update all pages that are open,
therefore if lots of pages are open then it may be doing a lot of unnecessary work that will slow down
the application. For pages that are displayed in the same place, set the 'Display Mode' property to
'Replace'. This allows pages to automatically be closed when a new page is loaded.
•
Use Logical Point names instead of physical addresses
Logical point names (like 'Boiler_3_Pressure') provide more flexibility than physical addresses (like
'D8319') allowing the PLC program and addresses to be changed, without impacting the SCADA.
They also make it much easier read during development, and more importantly, during maintenance.
Release 2.0
CHAPTER 17 – Best Practices
Page 253
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