Maybe there's already a way to do this that I'm not seeing, but it would be nice to be able to inhibit or deactivate a group so that on startup, it would not be started automatically.

Along the same lines of thinking, it would also be nice be able to deactivate an item, instead of having to delete it.

Just a thought.
-Dave

So, it wouldn't start initially, but would then start after some time? You may be able to accomplish what you want with triggers, especially considering that triggers can be action items that run queries, so you could do something like have a table in the database that had a column for "active" and a column for "groupid", and then have the various groups consult that table for whether or not they should run.

As for disabling an item- you can't do it on the fly, but if you were to stop the group and make the item "read-only" it would be essentially disabling it, to the database. It would still be active on the OPC side- read only mode is normally used to allow an item to be referenced in action items, the trigger, the where clause, etc. without being stored to the DB.

Hope this helps,

I don't think we're on the same page..

I simply meant an option to disable a group altogether, so that if someone later restarted the FactorySQL service, this group wouldn't "start."

I came across a situation where we moved a machine, but hadn't yet hooked up communications, so I'm assuming FactorySQL will now just error-out when starting the group. I thought that this might eventually fill an error-log with "not responding"-type messages, so "disabling" it would prevent that.

In addition it appears on the screen as RED, so my end-users will see it, and assume there's a problem and want to fix it.. If I could disable it, it just seems like a "cleaner" fix.

-Dave

Well in that case, you could simply "Stop" it. Groups only run when they're started, if they're not they just sit there, and won't start when the service starts.

When you get the machines hooked up, just go in and start it up.

Regards,

Colby here is an idea you can tell him, this is something you and I talked about on Thurs. If the user is using Kepserver, they can do what we done and use the _Enable out of the system tags for Kepserver. We used this as an SQL tag then I developed a page that has our machine numbers. This way when one gets taken out we can deactivate that channel. Will let you know how it work as time goes on but so far it seems ok and with proper authentication only certain people can open that page and deactivate a group or channel. Just a thought that the person might want to look into.

OK, I didn't realize they won't start on service-startup if they're in the stopped state when the service is stopped. . . If that sentence make any sense..