View Studio Site Edition – Command Line

Although Command Line is a simple thing to use, many people are not familiar with it. In this article, we’ll learn the use of the Command Line Function in FactoryTalk View  Studio Enterprise.

Before we start, it should be noted that the Command Line feature of FactoryTalk View Studio is a feature of View Site Edition and not View Machine Edition.

For those who don’t know, View Site Edition, or ViewSE for short, includes both HMI and SCADA functionality, while View Machine Edition (ViewME) is strictly promoted as an HMI product.

In short, this means that with ViewSE you’re unlimited in the variety of functions you can create yourself, including by way of the Commend Line.

Editor’s note: The Command Line feature found in ViewSE operates just like the command line found in the legacy package, RSView32 (originally ControlView for Windows in alpha, and renamed RSView during the beta,) which debuted in the mid to late 90’s, and just recently reached end of life – ST.

Opening a Project

Open Factory Talk Studio and open one of the application types marked in the below-mentioned image:

Create a new project or open an existing one. If you have created an HMI server then your project will look like this.

Under System, you can see the Command Line function:

Command Line

Command Line is a function that is used to execute commands when you are developing a project, or your data log is in testing mode.

It is executing commands when you are online with an application. When you close an application, you will lose your command. So, this is a temporary command used to test your created data log model.

We use macros for fixed commands. In macros, we can write a command to execute the data log On while startup of the application, and on the closing of the application, we can Off the data log. Same thing we do in Command Line but for temporary execution. We will understand this by using a small example.

Command Line with Example

Let’s create a display in which I am adding a trend. I will create a couple of memory tags to add to the trend display and to add to the data log model.

After Creating Tags, we will be adding those tags to the data log model as mentioned in the below image.

We will monitor those tags in a trend, which you can see in the below image:

To add tags, you must double click on the Trend display and select the data log model from the dropdown.

Select your created data log model and add those tags to the list. If you hit the ok, then you will find tags were added to the trend display.

Now, let’s monitor added tags. As you can see in the below image that data has started logging but, if you play again, you won’t see any historical data logging and only see live data.

Here, you can see that no historical data is logged:

To log historical data, we must turn On the data log model which we created. Normally in the final application, we keep this in macros but, for testing in development, we add this to a command line.

Open Command Line, double click on a blank area, and the following popup will open. You can see Two options DataLogOn and DataLogOff, Which are used to turn the On and Off data log model to Log Historical data.

Click On DataLogOn and hit the “Next” button.

The following popup will open. Select the file you want to add. This file is which we created in Data Log Model.

Hit “Finish”.

As you can see that our command is added to the command line:

Hit Enter key to execute the command. The command will be erased as soon as you hit enter button.

In the same way, you can add as many commands as possible from the list and easily execute them from here.

In conclusion, Command Line is the simplest of things in Factory Talk View SCADA, which is used to execute on-demand Command without adding it to macros and make changes every time without finalizing it.

Hope you will find this article informative and useful.

Written by Suhel Patel
Automation Engineer and Freelance Writer

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Suhel Patel

Suhel is a freelance writer for The Automation Blog, as well as an Automation Engineer working in Sarla Technologies for global devision who enjoys writing about Automation in his free time.

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