I am developing a control and monitoring application, and for the visualization portion I am using a TP1500 Comfort Panel (required hardware per customer spec) and TIA Portal V19.

Customer specifies that Gauge object shall be used for visualizing pressures, temperatures, etc.

We do not know all the parameters of the subsystems we will be monitoring e.g. proper values of upper 1, upper 2 limits of a tag for alarming. For many of these measurements, we will only be able to determine appropriate limits during installation.

I want to give the field engineers (who in this case also happen to be my customer) the capability to adjust limits (stored in a data block on the PLC) from the HMI assuming they are at the appropriate authorization level.

I have created a faceplate that contains a Gauge and an output-only IO field (digital counterpart to the process value displayed on the Gauge).

My only option when adding Scale Gradation to the faceplate interface is to enter a constant into the Static value column of the interface. Dynamization is not an option.

I thought I'd be clever and dynamize scale gradation behind the scenes by triggering a VB script within the faceplate when the tag-based minimum and/or maximum scale value changes, but this Gauge property is not accessible with faceplate scripting.

It appears that I could have access to this property in the VBS object model if I used a Gauge object outside of a faceplate.

So it appears what I've got is many, many instances of a faceplate where the field engineer / authorized user can adjust minimum scale value, maximum scale value, any and all alarm limits, alarm delay time -- practically anything that might need to be adjusted. BUT, if the min and max scale values deviate too far from what was chosen during development, static Scale Gradation means you end up with a gauge that ranges anywhere from "hmm, that looks a bit off" to "entirely illegible".

I would  like to be able to hand my customer a flexible product that they can adapt to the final application as needed without having to call me for seemingly trivial adjustments.

Meanwhile, if the Gauge object was not a customer requirement, I could use the Bar object instead, simply navigate to Properties -> Scales -> Settings, enable the Autoscale property, select the desired number of Divisions and I'm off to the races.

I assume there have not been any developments or updates that address this issue, but would be glad for someone to prove me wrong. 

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Split from Scripting in Faceplates.

Hi Murof,

Thank you for your reply. My faceplate is designed to work just as you demonstrated.

I'll provide an example that will hopefully illustrate the problem I am facing:

Let's say I put a Gauge object on a screen. For that Gauge object I create 3 tags as shown in the attachment 'gauge example'.

max_gauge initially has a value of 100.

Then, during runtime the value of max_gauge is changed from 100 to 1000.

This Gauge looks ugly now. To compensate, I write a script called UpdateScaleGradation that is called by the Value Change event for max_gauge and min_gauge.