Explorer Release 4.9.7

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P2 Explorer version 4.9 is a minor release that redefines the Trending Tool technology and adds frequently requested enhancements to the trend. This release also improves the performance of the Data Table and supports further enhancements to Shift Log. 

Explorer 4.9.7 includes trend enhancements with a focus on improving how the trend handles poorly performing historians, license auditing for better transparency and management of end users, and various adaptor improvements for better performance.

 

License Audit Report

P2 Explorer Administration is now able to show license usage for Explorer and Shift Log. This improves transparency and management of end user licensing.

License data is configured with available licenses, and Explorer calculates how many licenses are in use by looking at the combination of security privileges in use.

Note that license metrics will be delivered incrementally. The current release covers 3 metrics, additional metrics will be delivered in future release.

 


Trend Enhancements

Changes have been made to the trend to better handle poorly performing data sources.

The Range Selector is now turned off by default when a trend is initially opened. A configuration option has also been added to disable the Range Selector entirely, so that it can’t be turned on.

Configuration options have been added that prevent the trend from automatically fetching data beyond a specified period of time. Instead, a button has been introduced to allow users to perform a manual fetch. This means that data sources that take a long time to respond to requests will not block other users from being able to use the system. The options are as follows:

Setting Description
MinimumTrendRefreshRate The minimum trend refresh rate to use when Now is set. The refresh rate is this value or the sample interval, whichever is greater.
MaximumAutoFetchDuration The maximum duration (i.e. difference between start time and end time) before the trend's auto fetch is disabled and manual fetch is required. Valid values:
5 Minutes
10 Minutes
30 Minutes
1 Hour
4 Hours
8 Hours
12 Hour
1 Day
3 Days
5 Days
1 Week
4 Weeks
1 Month
3 Months
6 Months
9 Months
1 Year
2 Years
MaximumTrendDuration The maximum duration that is shown in the duration drop-down. This also modifies the start time or end time if their difference is greater than this limit. The value must match to a valid duration string (similar to the MaximumAutoFetchDuration valid values), or set to an empty string (meaning that no limit is applied).
DisableRangeSelector Prevents the Range Selector in the trend from being displayed, and disables the Range Selector icon in the toolbar. Default: False

 

Trend with manual fetch enabled:

Trend with auto fetch enabled:

 


Entity Hierarchy Improvements

When searching for entities within a hierarchy in P2 Explorer, entities were only displayed by display name, which made it difficult to distinguish them when duplicate display names were being used.

The entity search has been improved to:

  • Display up to 50 matching results.
  • Show a description and template name in the results list.
  • Also show the unique name in a tooltip.

 


PI Adaptor

The PI Adaptor has two new parameters, which address accuracy issues caused by conversions between double and floating point numbers.

  • Use Custom Floating-point Conversion: When this flag is set to false, the adaptor will use the .NET runtime's built-in conversion algorithm for converting PI floating-point values to decimal. If it is set to true, then a custom algorithm will be used which can produce more accurate decimal values.
  • Number of Decimal Places For Custom Floating-point Conversion: This setting specifies the number of decimal places to round to when the custom algorithm is used for converting PI floating-point values to decimal.

 


IP21 Adaptor

The IP21 Adaptor has a new parameter to better handle confidence when a value is not supplied by the historian.

  • "Quality Not Available" Confidence: The confidence value to use for data points where IP21 does not report a quality level. This value will be clamped to the range 0-100.

 


PHD Adaptor

The PHD Adaptor has a new parameter to better handle null data points in the historian.

  • Null Handling: This parameter controls how the adaptor handles the presence of "null" (confidence = -1) data points in the historian. Note that changing this setting can, depending on the functions used, significantly affect the results of calculations based on tags from this datasource, should those tags contain such "null" points within the fetch range (default: As Historian).

 

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