The Alarm system in WinCC OA conforms to international standards for alarm management. The standards do not specify a lot of details about how the alarm system must look for the operator and this is a common request for custom layout. WinCC OA provides a number of tools to create and customize the AES screen, but it is not well documented.
The alarm and events screen defaults can be edited at runtime by clicking on the Properties button. This allows for a wide array of filters and visual changes you can make. But, as soon as you stop this UI, the changes will revert back to the defaults. This is by design.
Most customers want a customized view. In the System Management → Settings → A&E Row/Screen, there is a tool for creating 3 different types of named custom properties.
- Screen Configurations - general settings like sliders
- View Properties - Time ranges, filters, sorting, and what columns are visible
- Alerts and Events - layout and click details about how each type of summary will work
Most users create new named Screen and View details and use them.
If you need the system to load your custom version of the screen and corresponding view, you will need to change the Alerts button usually on the topology navi panel. See the function openAES() in the help for details on how to use your named screen configuration.
Sometimes projects get more complex and have many different views that are filtered or with multiple different layouts. For this, it is useful to know how the A&E Row/Screen button affects the internal datapoints and how they are related.
- Screen Configurations - _AEScreen data type with the following pre-defined screen configurations
- _AEScreen_0000 - aes_default
- _AEScreen_0001 - aes_alerts
- _AEScreen_0002 - aes_events
- _AEScreen_0003 - aes_alertRow
- _AEScreen_0004 - aes_command
- View Properties - _AESProperties data type with the following pre-defined view properties
- _AESProperties_0001 - aes_propEvents
- _AESProperties_0002 - aes_propAlerts
- _AESProperties_0003 - aes_propAlertRow
- _AESProperties_0004 - aes_propCommand
- Alerts and Events - _AESConfig data type with the column details found from the Events and Alerts tabs
- _AESConfig - summary screen configurations from both the Events and Alerts tab settings
- _AESConfigRestore - default settings that gets overwritten when you use the default properties
- _AESConfigRow - alarm banner layout and column details
- _AESConfigRowRestore - default settings that gets overwritten when you use the default properties
It is not recommended to edit these provided data points directly, it is always best to created a new named versions using the tools. However, there are times that the relationships between these internal datapoints is useful to understand.
The relationship between the View Properties data point and the named Screen configuration is found in the _AEScreen_xxxx which contains your .Name inside the data point.
The details about the filters and what columns are visible are found in the AESProperties_xxxx data point with your .Name element. The other _AESPropertiesRT* are unique instances for different UIs, modules, etc. These can be manipulated using dpSet commands to force custom filters on the fly.
Additional concepts:
Check out the aes_command screen configuration. It uses a filtered view for tags that have the *.cmd and others in it. It is an event filter for anyone who changed a command.
The event viewer is actually a history viewer. Yes, events as they occur will be seen scrolling on the event summary, but if you define a timerange that is in the past, it will go out to the archive files and for those DPEs with _archive config, it will display any changes during that timeframe in time sorted view.
With filters on both the alarms and the events, using the dual view with the alarms on top and the events on the bottom can give the users a clear picture of the cause and affect relationships.
Consider using DPGroups as filters. They are easier to update and can use complex wildcards to define the group.