Alarms Historical

The alarms have two pieces of useful information to give them more detail, a Unique ID and a Transaction ID. The Unique ID is created the once the project is put into runtime mode for the first time, and is a number between 1 and 2147483647, being a Long number. This value is unique for all the alarms, meaning that each alarm has its own Unique ID, which is saved in the alarms' status file in the project's ALARM folder. Once this ID has been created it will remain so until the alarm's status file is cancelled after which it will be assigned a new Unique ID which may be different from its last one. The Transaction ID, however, is increased each time the alarm turns ON and remains at this value until the alarm turns ON again. Therefore all the ON,ACK, RESET and OFF events are recorded with the same Transaction ID. The Transaction ID's initial value is zero. Its value is saved in the alarm's status file and is loaded at the project startup. The value limit is 2147483647, long number type value that once reached restarts from the 1 value. The Transaction ID restarts from zero when the alarm's status file is cancelled.

These two ID values are recorded in the Historical Log table as well and where two new columns have been inserted, "UniID" and "TraID" for this purpose. The values of these two columns only have meaning for the Historical Log "Alarm" table and not the "SysMsgs" and "Drivers" table.

After entering these new features, in a Client-Server configuration all the applications must be aligned with the same Movicon 11 version. In fact an Alarm Window or a Historical Log window will not be able to retrieve logged alarms or events from a project run with an earlier Movicon version.

Each time an alarm event is recorded, it will be identified with an Unique ID and a Transaction ID. This consents to a more structured and detailed alarm information in the "Alarms Window and in the "Historical Log Window":

Historical Log Window

The alarm events are displayed in groups according to the Transaction ID. For instance, the "ON", "ACK", "OFF" and "RESET" events recorded for the same alarm event will have the same Transaction ID, and the one same Unique ID, and will be displayed as an Alarm subgroup. There is a "+" symbol next to the alarm's text that when clicked on opens a tree structure showing all the events of that alarm.

Alarms Window

The alarms are listed in the window in the usual way. However, when selecting an alarm and clicking on the "Get History" button, all the history for that alarm will be retrieved, which included all the times the alarm was activated and the events generated for each activation ("ON", "ACK", "OFF"and "RESET"). A "+" symbol will appear on the left of the alarm's text which will open a tree of the alarm's chronology when clicked on.

Alarm Statistics

There has also been a series of function added to the "AlarmThresholdCmdTarget" interface which allow you to get statistical information on alarms. This information is always saved in the alarm's status file:

TotalTimeOn: returns the alarm's total on time

LastTotalTimeOn:returns the date and time of the alarm's last ON transaction

LastComment: Sets or returns an alarm comment

GetTotNumOn: returns the total number of times the alarm went ON

GetTotNumAck:returns the total number of times the alarm was acknowledged

GetTotNumReset: returns the total number of times the alarm was reset

GetUniqueID: returns the alarm's Unique ID

GetTransactionID: returns the alarm's transaction ID

Alarm recording language

When multi-languages and alarms are handled in a project they are associated to String IDs. The same alarm may be recorded in the historical log in different languages. The language used for inserting records (ON, OFF, ACK and RESET events) is the one active in the project when event was recorded.

If the user management has not, the alarm event will be recorded using the language that was used before user logged on. If the logged user has been enabled in the project, or if no user has logged on, the alarm event will be recorded using the language that is active at that moment. However, if the alarm event is executed while a user is logged on in the project, the alarm event will be recorded using the language that was active before user logged on. However, if the user's LogOn have been activated with a custom language or if the user has changed languaged after logging on, the alarm event will nevertheless still be recorded with the language that was active before user logged on.