Optix Presentation Engines

Description
This video looks at the differences between the Native Presentation Engine and the Web Presentation Engine in FactoryTalk Optix.

A Presentation Engine determines how the UI of an app is displayed. In FactoryTalk Optix Studio, a Presentation Engine object is required to display the FactoryTalk Optix Application at runtime.

Use the Native Presentation Engine for typical HMI applications that run on targets with an operator panel. There can be only one Native Presentation Engine in a FactoryTalk Optix Studio project.

Use a Web Presentation Engine to make a web user interface available to multiple users who connect from different web browsers. There can be only one Web Presentation Engine in a FactoryTalk Optix Studio project.

Transcript
(00:01) in this video I want to look at the presentation engines that are available in Factor talk Optics and by default when you create a factory talk Optics um project in uh Studio this native presentation engine uh is already there underneath the UI or user interface folder and the native presentation engine is essentially um the HMI piece of it so if you wanted to display a the HMI elements locally here on this on this PC then the native presentation engine is what is what would be Bas basically running um so when you click
(00:42) on Native presentation engine on the properties over here we get some properties for it there aren’t too many things um one is the uh you know variable pulling rate you can adjust your variable polling rate how fast you want to um update the tags being readed for the PLC um text render type you want to enable virtual keyboard yes or no um handy if you want to pop up a keyboard on the screen um especially for a touchcreen um if there’s a particular login window you want to force a user to you can Define that you can also set up what the
(01:20) starting window is and uh the starting user if there are multiple users and a stylesheet uh as well uh by the default there is this default stylesheet and you can also see the default stylesheet right here if I go ahead and double click on that we will see or I should just say um I click on it to get the properties uh the stylesheet essentially lets us set up all the kind of properties uh such as the you know colors and fonts and styles of the application I want to um just take a moment here if I if you go to the
(01:59) library uh up in studio and if you type in stylesheet you will find that there are some uh pre-developed stylesheets that come uh there’s a friendly dark friendly light mode and Isa stylesheet as well as material dark so if you wanted to you could take one of these um pre-built stylesheets from the library and then basically click on it and drag it over here that youu my folder and it will become available for you to to reference you can of course make your own custom Styles sheets as well if you right click
(02:39) on UI and go to new one of the things you can choose here is a stylesheet so anyway we’ll stick with the default stylesheet for the native presentation engine and that’s pretty much it and this is basically you know by doing that when I uh press my emulator button up top that is what um it’s still rendering here uh there we go finally uh this is basically what what gets created right this is the the the Optics um HMI that is now running I can close that so if I wanted to I could also create a web presentation engine which
(03:32) would basically allow me to to uh have web sessions or web clients into the Optics um application so to do that we would rightclick on UI say new and we’ll choose web presentation engine and that gets created there over here in the properties we see that there are some similar properties such as you know what is our dynamic pulling rate um which protocol do we want to use you want to use https or HTTP I’ll choose HTTP for this demonstration um an IP address of the server uh a port number and I’m going to use 8443 for this example um you can define
(04:21) a host name for the PC um maximum number of clients or connections that would be allowed so right now defaults to one um you can increase that number perhaps I’ll set mine to two um just note that if you were to use these web um clients uh this they do take tokens so um so so having you know one one concurrent web client would take one token to have two or more would take additional tokens to unlock that that ability um the other you know thing at the bottom is basically the same the same as the native there’s the longin window the
(05:07) start window the starting user and the default you know stylesheet you want to use as well as some maybe some session um information so if you’re looking for any additional references as to what all that means uh if you go up here to the question mark and go to help you will open up the the help file and if you go under graphic objects there is a section for presentation engines which basically basically um gives us more information about the native and the web as well as uh click down on configure and it talks
(05:41) about what all of those settings in the property panel actually mean so always refer to the help file there if you uh need some additional information on things all right so now with the web presentation engine if I were to go ahead and start up the emulator one more time this will basically open up the the same uh Native presentation engine like we just saw a moment ago but if I come back to my Chrome browser and if I type in since I’m on the uh since I am sitting here on the local computer I could just I could just say Local Host
(06:25) and then port 8443 and then here is my web session all right so um just a really straightforward uh screen I have going here um I’m requiring us to log in to be able to see additional information I just wanted to kind of show that basically the login is you know passes through of course to the web session log in as user 2 when I log in as user 2 well unit 2 information becomes comes available and I can now kind of control it and we can see on the overview screen that that number is changing if I come back to uh user I can
(07:10) log out if I were to come back to the native and go to users I could log in as user one now this unit one information is available in the native note that it is of course not available on the web client so I can change my unit one value here on the native and it will update on the overview screen of course but uh it doesn’t allow me to go and control it um on the web client and just to show that uh you know I said two concurrent connections um back on my host laptop I’m running Optics currently in a in a virtual
(07:53) machine if I go back to my my host um laptop here is a uh an edge session that uh is now the you know basically instead of typing in Local Host I typed in the IP address of my virtual machine that’s 1921 16886 40 and then the port 8443 and I get that same um you know I get the overview screen right and I can once again log in here I’m going to log in as user 3 user 3 has privilege to to see both units so he gets to see unit one and unit two and make the adjustments all right so got two concurrent uh web sessions going on as
(08:45) well as a native presentation so I’m going to shut this down and when I do that notice that the server unreachable is uh becomes you know shows up here in the screen so I shut the server down um one more thing I want to show you is that you don’t have to have the native presentation engine we can actually delete the native presentation engine and that would now make this Optics application a web client connection only so if you wanted to run this on such as a a headless PC um you know just a node PC or box PC in the panel you don’t have
(09:23) to have a screen tied locally to your you know to the panel you can just um interface it through the web engine so to emulate that I just essentially deleted the native presentation engine I’m going to run the emulator one more time this time we’re not going to see anything um as far as uh the HMI component I have the emulator is running see this the stop button is visible there is no little orange icon down here any longer that’s showing the local uh Native presentation engine running but if I were to come back to my edge
(09:58) browser um you can see that we now are getting uh numbers back again and if I go to the Chrome um here in the uh I go to the Chrome here in my virtual machine I’ve got the uh the the the uh web servers back up and again I can log in as a particular user see if I type that right nope try one more time there and we’re back right so um so we don’t have to run the native presentation engine we don’t have to run a web presentation engine but we have the ability to choose if we want to uh have a local you know native HMI so to
(10:53) speak on the PC or if we just want to serve up um as a web uh as web uh sessions or web clients um from a headless PC

Tutorial List

• Linking pushbuttons to a Logix tag
• Dynamic Link Key-Value Converter
• Create reusable graphics
• Object model alias
• Alias with Logix a UDT
• Dynamic alias index with Logix UDT
• Popup Dialog Box
• Build a faceplate
• Create Variables with Structured Data Types
• Rockwell Automation Device Libraries for Optix
• Optix Presentation Engines
• New Windows for Web Presentation Engine
• Changing Languages for Localization
• ComboBox to Change PLC Tag
• Custom Made Buttons