Ignition 8.1.29: Scripting Security Improvement, New Driver Data Types, Perspective Quality-of-Life Updates

Important Note: To fix a notable regression, Ignition 8.1.29 has been pulled and replaced by Ignition 8.1.30. Please see here for more details.

The release train is a vehicle of many speeds. Let’s put the pedal to the metal, shovel some more coal into the boiler, press the start button even harder, and see how fast it can go (the release train is also a vehicle of many propulsion systems).

Ignition 8.1.29 (Ignition 8.1.29 has been replaced by 8.1.30; please see note above) delivers nimble improvements to security when canceling scripts, new data types for the Siemens S7 driver, quality-of-life updates for Perspective, and more. No time for cute section titles! We’re moving too fast!

Web UI

The first improvement on our speedrun concerns the Gateway Status page. In Ignition 8.1.29, the visibility of the Cancel button in the Currently Running Scripts section now depends on the user’s permissions. If, for example, a user has access to the Status page but not the Config page, that user will not be able to cancel a script while it is running.

This update is a useful security measure for administrators who want to prevent status-only users from canceling things like gateway-level scripts that could have far-reaching consequences.

Driver Data Types

Now we’re finding our stride. Ignition 8.1.29 adds support for the Date_and_Time data type as well as the LREAL and LINT data types in the Siemens S7 driver to increase the functionality of your Ignition system with the hardware you already have.

There are a lot of data types unique to specific devices, Siemens devices especially. Our Dev team has been making a concerted effort to add more data types as they are requested. If there are any that they haven’t gotten to yet, make sure to click that feedback link at the bottom of the post and let us know.

Perspective

Ignition 8.1.29 gets a turbo boost from two Perspective quality-of-life updates.

Path Property Button

8.1.29 adds a new button in the Property Editor for any component with path property. Pressing this button will take you directly to the Source View along that path. The GIF below demonstrates how to use the button with a simple Flex Repeater Component.

Dropdown Min/Max

8.1.29 also adds the new maxMenuHeight and minMenuHeight properties to the Dropdown Component to give more menu height flexibility. Previously, the Dropdown menu height was hard-coded and unchanging, like a brick wall, except the bricks were selectable options. Now, you can adjust the menu to better match the number of options you wish to show at any given time.

Honorable Mentions

Almost there! Let’s keep up the pace. Ignition 8.1.29 has even more improvements worth highlighting.

Alarm Status

Simple one-way email notification profiles in Ignition and Ignition Edge now contain an optional From Address field. This advanced property option lets you specify a “from” address to adhere to requirements for certain SMTP servers.

Gateway Network

Previously, some EAM tasks would fail after 60 seconds when sending large files through a proxy gateway due to a hard-coded timeout. This setting has been increased to 60 minutes by default and is adjustable via the -Dws.handoff.timeout=3600 system property. Keep in mind, you must set this property on the proxy gateway.

OPC UA

Users can now pass lists as parameters expecting arrays, i.e. writing to array tags and calling methods with array inputs.

Users can now set the BACnet local device ID used on the redundant backup independently from the ID used on the master.

Scripting

The RosterModel returned from running the system.roster.getRoster(String) script now includes the roster description text from the Config page as well.

system.db.runNamedQuery now returns a PyDataSet instead of a Dataset. This does not affect the return values of other types. This change is also backward compatible.

Tag Historian

Added better logging for the monitoring of preprocessed tag history values to make the diagnosis of potential problems easier.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Learn more about these updates and other improvements in the release notes and the Ignition user manual. As always, we value your feedback about what types of new features you’d like to see in upcoming releases. Until then, check back in August for the next Ignition release.