Providing visual cues to operators is the key to developing good operator displays. One way to provide these cues is to animate objects based on alarms. Another powerful way to do this is to add an Alarm Summary object to a picture. This object lets operators select, acknowledge and delete multiple alarms, sort and filter alarms, and enable, disable, and silence the Alarm Horn. You can also use the Alarm Summary object to color-code alarms by alarm status and priority to provide visual cues to your operators.
The alarm summary object contains text and color indicators that display the state of the Alarm Summary object. The default colors are Green = Run, Yellow = Pause, and Red = New Alarms. This indicator is located to the far right in the summary status bar. You can also configure the indicators to blink, and change colors and blink states through the Color property page in the AlmSumOCX user interface.
If you select multiple alarms, the alarm summary object pauses, and no new alarms come in. Any subsequent deletes, acknowledgements, or deselects automatically resumes the alarm summary. However, if you manually pause the alarm summary first, regardless of the subsequent action, the alarm summary will not resume. You must manually resume the alarm summary.
By default, the Alarm Summary object displays unacknowledged and acknowledged block alarms. When a block's value returns to normal and the alarm has been acknowledged, the Alarm Summary Service automatically deletes the alarm. The Acknowledge column is frozen so that it is always the left-most column. This allows the operator to always see the acknowledgement state, even when they have used the scroll bars to view the right-most column.
